Count Your Blessings

I'll get this down where the short people are. Good to see all of you. It's a pleasure to be in Chicago. I had flown—my wife and I had flown in under the radar the last two years doing the ministerial thing, sneaking in just before services, sitting in the back, enjoying a sermon. And Mr. Faye caught me this year about a week in advance and assumed—I guess based on two years of track performance— that I would be here for Thanksgiving and ask if I would speak, and I said I'd be more than happy to do so. Always a pleasure to come into Chicago.

Family-wise, Chicago's epicenter for us of family traditionally. In respect to the fact that we've lived in and all around it, family-wise, both my younger brothers served in the ministry in Chicago, my mom and dad 14 years in Wisconsin Dells, Diane and I 7 years with the Elkhart, Plymouth, and Michigan City congregations, and of course Chicago being our YOU base. So Chicago's a very comfortable location. In fact, for the 14 years that my folks lived in the Dells, either the winter break or Thanksgiving was the time that we packed the kids up, drove through Chicago, headed up to the Dells, spent the period with them, and then packed through Chicago to get home.

So it's always a treat to be here. I have my Thanksgiving a day early. We fly in, and I find the nearest place I can get a gyros. Greek salad, baklava, spana capita, or anything else. My wife and I were transferred to the West Coast to Seattle, Washington, first of all, in... I lose track of time. I think 1990. We were there for 10 years. And my greatest lament was I could never find any good Greek food. I was reading the restaurant page one day in the Seattle Times, and it said... and it was the restaurant review, and it says, has anybody seen a good Greek restaurant?

And I said, well, that's a catchy introduction to a review of a Greek restaurant. And so they did the normal restaurant review, and they ended the review saying, has anybody seen a good Greek restaurant? And that is the epitome of the Northwest. I don't know what the problem is. Greeks don't like us, I guess. And the few that do go there, they forget the price of Greek food. And so anything like I'm used to in Chicago is two to three times the price for the same amount.

So I have my Greek fix every year, and then we do Thanksgiving. In that context, in regards to Thanksgiving, I don't know about you, but I look at Thanksgiving as, for me and my family, I look at Thanksgiving as the single most notable non-church holiday. Outside of our Holy Days, when I look at the entirety of the rest of the calendar, Thanksgiving stands on a pedestal. There's just simply nothing else of the same stature. And I've been in mourning the last two to three years.

I've been in semi-mourning longer than that, but I've been in mourning the last two or three years. It started with reading in the newspaper that Halloween had surpassed all other days except Christmas in terms of its economic impact. That it had passed Mother's Day, Easter. Next to Christmas, Halloween had become the most profitable annual holiday on the American business calendar. My wife and I live catty-corner across the street from a family.

I guess I need to do the preliminary here. Those of you that are familiar with the comedic movie depictions of this time of year, I don't think there's any... well, I shouldn't say that. The Home Alone series and prior to that, the Chevy Chase National Lampoon Christmas were probably the annual demonstrations of comedy. And those of you that have seen...

are there any of you... well, how many of you are familiar with Chevy Chase and National Lampoon Christmas? Okay, good. I'm speaking to an audience who are on the same wavelength. We have referred to my neighbor across the street as the Griswolds. Because every holiday is decorated like National Lampoon Christmas, where Chevy Chase and his wife and children were the Griswolds. There are coffins, and there are skeletons, and there are spooks, and there are cobwebs, and there are spiders, and there are everything on the front lawn, on the house, in the driveway, when Halloween comes.

I've got a very good neighbor. I always add the disclaimer to this. My neighbor is a superb neighbor. They're a delightful family, good community people, but they decorate to the hill. One of the very nice things about them is, within two days after the holiday, all the decorations are down, and the house looks back to normal, so it's not one of those laborious things. So I watched this year with Halloween. I saw all the decorations go up. Halloween passed by Sunday afternoon. Everything was down. I walked out to the front step to get the newspaper, and I looked down the street. This is two days after Halloween, and one of the houses down the street was already fully decorated with Christmas lights. I walked back in, shaking my head to my wife, and I said, you know what? Thanksgiving is becoming a national afterthought. There's no money in it. Turkey just simply is not as profitable as costumes and Christmas presents. And I said, I'm watching the death of a holiday that is the only time in the year where people have an opportunity legitimately to stop, back up, slow down, recognize there is a God, and say thank you.

Two years ago, when my morning began, I told my wife at the nearest grocery store, which is more like an old mercantile. They have everything from soup to nuts there. It's a Northwestern institution called Fred Myers. I said, you know, Halloween has just ended. If I were a betting man, I would bet you when we walk into Fred Myers, if you listen carefully to the sound system, you'll hear Christmas music.

We did and we did. Walked into Fred Myers in the background. Low volume, but in the background were the Christmas carols, and it was two days after Halloween. So for me, and when I say for me, I really speak for all of us as I get into the message, it will only emphasize and highlight the fact that it really, I can speak for everybody in the room. You may not express it the same way, but at the emotional level, I know the emotions will be the same. For me, it's a bittersweet time of year because it is still to me the greatest of American national holidays, and I'm watching a society who are becoming less and less grateful, express that lack of gratitude, by simply making this time an afterthought.

Let's go out, get our trick-or-treating done, let's do all of our decorating, and then when we're finished, let's get on to Christmas. I stop every year at this time, and I look at us, and I say, we have the capacity to bow our heads over a Thanksgiving meal as a focal point, and express gratitude in a way that no other Americans can. I don't know of any Americans outside of the Church of God who have the capacity, now you have to exercise it, but who have the capacity to bow their heads on Thanksgiving Day and say to God how grateful they are and to be eloquent about it.

Because for our society, Thanksgiving Day goes back to either the factual or the mythical. You know, people argue back and forth about that first Thanksgiving and the Indians and the pilgrims gathering and all the rest. And they go back there, and that's their start point. Your start point, my start point, goes so far back beyond that, that you can't even see the pilgrims from where we start. Because when you and I bow our heads and say to God, this is a nationally selected day for a nation to express national gratitude to you for its blessings.

When my head goes down, Abraham is in the spotlight. My head goes down, and Genesis 12 comes on the screen, and God speaking to a man and saying to that man, if you will exercise faith and step out and do what I'm asking you to do, I will give you what you can't imagine. And for 25 years, on not that frequent intervals, which is really a test to faith, because somebody gives you the grand prize, and then you really don't have a serious conversation with them for another 5-10 years, you can begin to question.

So when you look at Genesis 12 up to the end of Abraham's life, there aren't a lot of audible reminders. They get a little bigger each time, but they're spaced. And each time he makes it a little larger and a little firmer until he finally says it's irrevocable. It's yours. And nobody can take it away from you. It doesn't matter what your children are like, your children are going to receive it because of you.

That's where I start Thanksgiving. Because I don't look at the pilgrims as the ones and those who landed at Plymouth Rock and those who made those early established communities and colonies in New England as the ones that are responsible. They are simply the vehicle. They were simply the mechanism of the time that God used in order to start rolling it out. And so I look at everything that God promised to Israel, and I love history.

So when I look at Israel's history, I look at the entirety of Israel's years, the glory time of the end of David's reign, and all of Solomon's bounty. And when I look at it, it doesn't even begin to scrape the edges of the promise. And so as people look at Israel's history and say, well, God delivered, look at Solomon. Now, Solomon wasn't the delivery. Solomon was the, let me give you a sip off the soup spoon of what the feast is going to taste like. That's as far as Solomon and all of his glory went.

I go beyond there as I work my way through Genesis. And I go to the place where you and I become the focus. We go through what people like to think of as children's Bible stories that are not children's Bible stories. And we go through all the sons of Jacob. We see the jealousy of brothers for Joseph. We see the story of Joseph in Israel. We see a father that thinks he's lost his son. And finally, in the very end of his life, finds that his son is not only not dead, but his son has been blessed by God and given the position of a deliverer. And as everyone gets together, we have that famous event where Jacob, who is now Israel, calls his son Joseph, who he has now had restored to him, and says, I want to see your family. And he brings in his two boys, E. Freeman and Manasseh. And he says, I want you to bring them to me so that I can bless them. And we're all familiar with the famous crossing of the hands of a man who is so poorly sighted that his son thinks that his dad doesn't know what he's doing, and he picks up his hands to put them, and he says, no, I know exactly what I'm doing. I may not be able to see too well, but I know exactly what I'm doing. And he said, the older may be the older, and the younger may be the younger, but I intend to give the blessings the way that I intend to give the blessings. And he makes this phenomenal statement as he's blessing them, that Ephraim and Manasseh shall be to me as Reuben and Simeon. And people who just casually read over that don't realize what he just said. He said, I just rewrote my will. I just rewrote my will. I X'd out Reuben, first born, Simeon, second born, and in their place I put Ephraim and Manasseh. And so I look at Abraham, and I say, well, Abraham is responsible for all of the abundance that I see all the way across North America and all the way across most of Europe and in several colonial areas. But when you get down to where is the top of the stack in terms of abundance and blessings and prosperity, well, I'm living in it. You're living in it.

So now I look at the focus, and in Genesis 48 and 49, I see that the focus sharpens, and it sharpens on you, and it sharpens on me. It sharpens on everyone who has the blessing of living within these boundaries. So it isn't a racial thing. We're a land that has gathered people of all sorts of ethnic groups, and by being here, all those groups share that blessing.

When I look at Jacob's last act, he says, I want all my boys together, and I am going to pronounce to them—it gives me a little chill, because there are nonprofit prophets in the Bible, meaning we don't see them as prophets. And then they lay down these phenomenal prophecies, and we say, whoa, whoa, he doesn't carry the title prophet. Genesis 49 begins with these words, Jacob called his sons and said, Gather together that I may tell you what shall befall you in the last days. And you look at Jacob and you say, well, what does Jacob know about the last days? Humanly, I don't think he would have known anything about the last days, but there's inspiration here because he lays out upon his twelve sons what they're going to look like as bodies of people in the last days. My maternal relatives, my mom's family, are all, I think with very, very few exceptions even to this day, are all Mormons. And I remember living in a portion of Idaho for a while where the Mormon church had enough influence that there was a once-a-week concert from the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. And the announcer would always start with the same statement, you know, welcome, and he had a very poetic phrase that he would recite. And I didn't realize, I didn't realize until years after coming into the church, that he was simply reciting a piece of Jacob's blessing upon Ephraim and Manasseh.

Verse 22, Genesis 49, the focus goes from Abraham's seed to now the seed of Joseph. And he says that beginning in verse 22, Joseph is a fruitful bough, a fruitful bough by a well. His branches run over the wall. You ever watched a plant, a vining plant, that has the good fortune of having its roots right next to a consistent water source? If it's a noxious plant, it's going to be your biggest misery because it will never stop spreading. But he says of Joseph, it's a fruitful bough by a well, and it just runs over the wall.

The archers have bitterly grieved him, shot at him, and hated him. But his bow remained in strength. And the arms of his hands were made strong, and the hands of the mighty God of Jacob, from there is the shepherd, the stone of Israel, by the God of your Father who will help you, and by the Almighty who will bless you. Now, you know, that's quite a troop of people who are standing as your backup. He spends a couple of verses saying, all of this is going to be yours by the power of the mighty God. He's the one that's going to assure it.

He's the one that's going to notarize it. And he says, he's going to give you the blessings of heaven above, the blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breast and the womb, the blessings of your Father have excelled, the blessings of my ancestors. The phrase that I remember as a child hearing as they would introduce the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, was this next statement of up to the utmost bounds of the everlasting hills. And I used to think as a kid that that's a beautifully turned phrase. Well, it's a plagiarized phrase, and it's a part of the blessings of our people.

And he said, all of this is going to be on the head of Joseph, and on the crown of the head of him who was separated from his brothers. So when Thanksgiving Day comes for us, our start point is a little bit early, isn't it? It doesn't rest on pilgrims. It doesn't rest on the settlement of New England. It doesn't rest upon the Declaration of Independence. It doesn't rest upon any of the things of the 17th century, the 18th century as this nation is being founded, or even into the 19th century when this day was declared a national holiday. It rests upon the fact that you and I know who we are.

And because we know who we are, we can give thanks at a depth, and with a sense of appreciation, that's not there for those who don't understand the source. You know, any time we as Americans stand and we say, look at what my hand has built, we enter this precarious world that so many kings of the past have done from the Nebuchadnezzar and onward who have stood with pride and said, look what my hand has made.

Look what my intelligence has created. Look at what my Yankee ingenuity has put together. And God says, whoa, back that trolley up a little bit. This isn't about you. It isn't about your might, and it isn't about your ingenuity. Because he said, somewhat in an somewhat uncomplementary fashion back in prophetic times, he said, I found you laying in your afterbirth along the roadside.

That's how significant you were in the stream of human history. And I cleaned you up, brought you home, and adopted you. It was God's way of saying, there's nothing about you that's special because of who you are. That all of your specialness is because of what I have determined by my own free will to give you. Now, you know, it's almost the three areas that I go to each year mentally as I approach thanksgiving are, in a sense, like an hourglass with a bulb on the top and the narrow waist and then a bulb on the bottom.

Because it's here in Genesis, chapter 49, that it narrows down. And we see that these blessings of the blessings of heaven and the blessings of the deep and the blessing of fruitfulness, the breast, the womb, the blessings of your fathers, excelling the blessings of your ancestors, that these are narrowed down right here to our peoples. When we get to Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28, God reiterates these in a covenantal fashion to all of Israel. But you know, Israel understood who the first-born tribes were in terms of benefit. So even in those blessings, they would have understood in a patriarchal sense who has the, so to speak, the double portion.

So we can look at it, and I'd like you to turn back to Deuteronomy 28. We can look at it, and we can see that this is being written to all 12 tribes. But in the context of what we already saw in Genesis 49, we can understand that the greater share, the more abundant share, was offered to the children of Joseph.

In Deuteronomy 28, I'd like to read to you the first 13 or 14 verses, because these lay out in greater detail what we already read regarding the children of Joseph in Genesis 49. He said, now it shall come to pass the first verse of Deuteronomy 28, if you will diligently obey the voice of the Lord your God, to observe carefully all His commandments, which I command you today, that the Lord your God will set you high above all nations on the earth.

I think God is a master of understatement. I will set you high above all the nations of the earth. I enjoy periodically going back to Mr. Armstrong's larger addition, square-backbound addition of the United States and British Commonwealth in prophecy, because it has, I think, the best summation of the 1950s and 1960s, and the percentage of the world's blessings that we had.

And when you go back in a relative sense, it takes your breath away, because the peak is flattened. It used to be volcanic, with just a very narrow, sharp top, and it is flattened out to where we still have awesome blessings, but we're not that distinguishable from a lot of other people.

I still remember when Mr. Fay and I and the rest of the students that were sent over to Bricketwood, they allowed us a privilege they didn't normally give. We had arrived, and they let us do a tour of Europe the summer we arrived. That was not custom, and they sort of said, well, this is not what we normally do, but we'll make an exception. So we got in two cars with the warden of the college, warden meaning the head of women's residences, Mrs. Horn. She was our chaperone. And when I look back at it, when I look back at it now, honestly, even though we did it, I can't wrap my head around it.

But Arthur Frommer published a book entitled, Europe on Five Dollars a Day. We toured Europe on five dollars a day. Now, the book is written so that that does not include your transportation cost. So the car and the gas was apart from that. The disparity in wealth in post-World War II Europe with the United States allowed us on an exchange rate to travel Europe on five bucks a day for food and lodging.

Now, as I said, I did it, but I can't tell you today how in the world that was possible. I'd have to get Frommer's book, you know, from an old bookstore and actually read his listings about what it cost for lodging and for food. Today, well, it's the other way around. You want to go someplace cheap for vacation? If you're a European, you come to the United States. If you're an American, you don't go to Europe.

So things have changed since the glory period. When I read Deuteronomy 28 and I asked, when was the pinnacle of the verses I'll read you? The cresting, the peak, the tipping point would have been somewhere in the 60s. He said in verse 2, All these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you because you obey the voice of the Lord your God.

What an awesome way of putting it. I live in a mountainous area. I'm familiar every year with somebody getting caught in an avalanche. And when I think of being overtaken by something, I see the skier who's got a wall of snow coming down behind him. God says, no, this isn't tragedy. I'm going to roll right over you like an avalanche with blessings. And all these blessings shall come upon you and overtake you. Blessed shall you be in the city.

Blessed shall you be in the country. Blessed shall be the fruit of your body, the produce of your ground, and the increase of your herds, and the increase of your cattle, and the offspring of your flocks. Every single solitary thing that can biologically produce will produce phenomenally. He says, now let's look at your grain. You know, we'll work from your fauna to your flora. Blessed shall be your basket and your kneading bowl.

Oh, by the way, all of your crops that you grow in the land, I'll give you bounty in those also. Blessed shall you be when you come in, and blessed shall you be when you go out. You know, every so often there's a person who feels so lucky. They say, you know, I can't lose for winning. It doesn't matter whether I go this way or I go that way.

Whichever way I go, it seems to work out for me. God says, nationally, welcome to my world. Blessed shall you be when you're going this way, and blessed shall you be when you're going that way. The Lord will cause your enemies, who rose or rise against you to be defeated before your face, and they shall come out against you one way, and they'll flee from you seven ways.

So you face an army that comes against you, and when it's finished, they're running every direction. I remember again when Mr. Faye and I were in Bricketwood at that particular time. If you took a train from the Watford Junction, it took you to Piccadilly Circus. It went from surface to tube, and when you came out, you came out at Piccadilly Circus. And Piccadilly Circus was, and I think probably still is, London's equivalent to Times Square.

And so the billboards were humongous. But this was the period of all of the British glory movies. Lawrence of Arabia, billboards bigger than this stage. Khartoum, 55 Days Peking, Zulu, and all of these movies that were the glory of the glory of the Empire. When 10 did chase a thousand, probably no more dramatic movie than Zulu, which was being aired at that time in the little station and the few people that were there.

Decimated by wave after wave after wave of Zulu warriors, and you reach the place emotionally when you're in the audience, just saying, they're almost out of ammunition, they're almost out of bodies to stand against the wall. And then on this mesa behind the station, there is this endless sea, all lined up of Zulu warriors. And you hear this sound that rises from them, and as an audience member, wrapped up in the plot of the thing, it's like, it's over.

One more sound of the charge, and somebody familiar with the Zulu practices said, there will be no charge. And as an audience member, you're sitting there trying to wrap your mind around it because it's been moving rapidly, and they said that last scene with an endless sea of Zulu warriors and the sound that rose from them was a sound of tribute. It was an homage to the tenacity of that little group of men who had held that station. And it was their way of saying, we honor you as warrior to war you, and the next minute the mesa was empty.

They were gone. But those were all the movies of the British heyday as they were living, in this particular case, following World War II, reliving the peak of the older brothers' prime, and we, the younger brother, in terms of inheritance, older by age, but the one that was given the second, were rising to our full ascendancy. He said in verse 8, The Lord will command the blessings on you in your storehouse, and in all to which you set your hands, and he will bless you in the land which the Lord your God is giving you. I don't know about you. I not only enjoy history, I enjoy current events. I have a book about Yea Thicke that is a laborious read.

It's a tremendous book. The title of the book is The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by Landis, and it's a think-tank study asking the question, why are prosperous nations prosperous, and why are impoverished nations impoverished? It's not just a conversational, you know, this is the evening radio talk show when people are talking. This is a book that's about 350 pages long, and 100 pages of it is bibliography, documentation. So it is a think-tank study. And the book was being written right at the time that to me was very fascinating, because the explosion of Japan in the commercial world had gone just far enough so that we had passed the place where people were wondering, is Japan going to become the number one economy in the world, and are we on a wane to where we're going to become secondary?

And it was almost like somebody had resuscitated the American economy, and the writers were catching it at that point where, wait a minute, wait a minute, where will this end up? You know, from our perspective, I'll speak my own perspective.

From my perspective, I look at it and I say, you know, these blessings that God has given us, there are times where you can look at pieces and say, is this a steady downhill slide? And then you look and you say, well, for whatever reason, which He hasn't told us, God appears not to be yet finished with us in that role. Now Japan has been in a ten-year-long recession, just basically shuffling along, keeping the nose above water. And we have come out of a great recession at this point in time, looking better than any other nation on the face of the earth.

It's one of those things you scratch your head and you shake it when you look at the fact that it's been a long time ago where we passed from being a significant face in the world energy market.

And then here we are back again exporting oil, drilling enough that we're shipping it somewhere else. And you just say, well, God, I'm a passenger in the backseat of the car and you will have to tell me, as we go along, where the markers are, because when I try to figure out when you've said, I've given you all the blessings I'm going to give, it seems that you then reach a place where you say, well, I'm not finished with you yet.

So I just sit back and shake my head and say, well, I'm the kid in the backseat looking at the scenery, and you'll have to point out what that scenery is all about.

This is what God offered. Offered it for obedience. I will enjoy when Christ returns, as all the rest of you will, asking certain questions. And you know one of the questions that I'm really interested in hearing an answer to? I'm interested in hearing Christ's assessment of relative righteousness. I have the history books. This nation has never, from the time of the Pilgrim Fathers, been righteous in the way that you and I, through calling, know righteousness should be lived. It reminds me a lot of Paul's statement about his own people in Romans, where he said they have a zeal without knowledge. I don't doubt the zeal of the early Pilgrim Fathers, but they didn't have the knowledge that you have and that I have.

I go back to 1830 when de Tocqueville came over from France, spent an extended time, wrote a volume about us, and his conclusion still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, because after he'd looked at this land and its awesomeness, he looked at every piece of it, that was so far beyond what he could find in Europe that there was no comparison. And he'd lay each one out in succession. He says, is this the reason the U.S. is great? In a pre-mechanical age, we had a highway-freeway system that was the envy of the world, with the Ohio and the Mississippi and our other waterways. We could move things all the way across continents, simply by the flow of water, from land of production to land of exportation. He says, is it in their mineral wealth? Is it in the bounty of their crops? And he went through all these rhetorical questions. Is it? Is it? Is it? Is it? And he finally said, it's none of these. It is in the character of the people.

And he made a statement that when the character of the people departs, so will the greatness of the nation. The nation is not great because of its mineral wealth. It is not great because of its fertile land. And it is not great because of, and we could go through all the becausees that the Tocqueville went through. And we could even add those of modern technology. He said, the greatness of the people is in the character of the people. And when that character goes, the greatness of this nation will go with it.

I'll share with you, not too terribly, in fact, I'll begin to share with you the evidence of the Tocqueville's observations. And I'll share with you the tipping point between the verses we've read in Deuteronomy 28 and what takes place starting with verse 15, where he says, Now on the other hand, it will come to pass if you don't do these things. And he starts stripping, and he strips one after the other, after the other, after the other of the blessings. We today are still the most blessed nation on the face of the earth. Proportionately, by ratio, we are nowhere near as blessed proportionately as we were 30 and 40 years ago. On a proportionate basis, we simply are beginning to look like more and more nations, rather than looking different from all the nations. And we've slipped enough in those years that even though we still have the awesome blessings that we have, we're no longer even remotely near the top in several categories that we used to own. So we still sit in the elite group, but we don't sit at the top of the elite group. We sit midway and sometimes at the bottom of the elite group. I won't go through the whole long history by turning to all of the Scriptures, but those of you, again, that have read the United States and British Commonwealth and Prophecy, you know the delay of blessing. The times that would pass and the prophetic day for a year mathematical computation, so that when you were finished, 2520 years would elapse between the point in time where I could have given these things to you and the time when I did. And when the mathematical computation is done and you look at this land, the end of the computation is as the 18th century turns into the 19th, the end of the 1700s, the beginning of the 1800s. We were poised for the kind of propulsion forward by the beginning of mechanical power, of steam power beginning to move things. Instead of water and wind being the only way that vessels moved across the ocean, steam beginning to move, factories beginning to form. In our land, because of the costs of war to Napoleon, we stole the heartland of this continent.

When Louisiana purchase was offered to us on pennies to the acre, we bought the finest grain belt that exists on the face of the earth. One of the greatest oil patches on the face of the earth. One of the greatest waterway systems on the face of the earth. And we paid a pittance. We doubled the size of our nation. From overseas looking at us, we turned from 13 colonies that had grown enough to add a 14th colony, and then to move over the Appalachians far enough to say to our soldiers that fought the Revolutionary War, we couldn't pay you in money, but we can pay you in land. And so if you're willing to move into Pennsylvania, and if you're willing to move into these lands, we will give you land and payment for your service. And that's where we were. And with one stroke of the signature of a president, we gathered everything from the Canadian border to Texas and all the way to the Colorado Rockies.

I can't think of too many nations that have changed their geographical boundaries that radically, that quickly in modern history. In fact, in terms of coming to mind, I can't think of any except the annexations of colonies by the British.

Since they were so small, when you annexed India, it sort of made an impression upon how much geography you controlled. As of, for instance, Australia did the same thing.

These were our blessings. These are the things that God gave us.

As we move forward, we lived in the kind of a land that de Tocqueville described, bounteous in every way and on a relative scale, a virtuous people. You know, to this very day, with the things that we can lament about our national character in many areas, we still have a national personality of generosity. In an outside-the-country look inside the country, there's just something about this land where people have tender hearts. They have tender hearts. They have relatively big pockets, and they're willing to put what's in their pockets where their hearts are. And their pockets aren't as deep as they used to be, and their hearts aren't quite as big collectively as they used to be, but it's still a part of the character of our people. I'd like to continue on chronologically, but I'd also like to take it sideways a little bit, because every person, sooner or later, as a child, has a thought go through their mind. It's that daydreaming thought of asking the question, when in time and history would you like to have lived? And in the fantasy of a young person, there's, oh, if I could have lived here, if I could have lived there, if I could have lived somewhere else, if I could have, if I could have, if I could have. You know what? For those whose heads look like mine, this part, not this part, for those whose heads look like mine, you've lived in the fairy tale time of all human history. For those of you who are younger, especially considerably younger, my condolences on a relative scale, you still, you still live.

You still live in a better time than any time in all of human history. I simply had the pleasure, and my peers had the pleasure, of growing up in an even better time in human history in this land. We had a teen outing a summer ago in the Portland area. We went out toward the coast and camped near the coastal range. And I had just, I honestly don't even remember how. It must have been simply catching my eye as I was walking through a place where there were books. I saw a book, and I said, oh, you know, that would be, that would be fun to purchase and use it as a part of the Bible study for the teens while we're out camping at the coast. It's a scholastic book, and so I think it's probably written for grade schoolers. The author, Anne McGovern, wrote a series of these, a small series, or about five in the series. The title of the book is, If You Lived 100 Years Ago. Now, she wrote it in 1995, so 100 years ago would have been right in the middle of what in America was considered the most abundant, good time to have lived in American history, the gay nineties. Time when people were happy, they were carefree. In other words, this was the view of the country where prosperous enough, things are developing fast enough that life is good.

So I sat with the teens, and I said, as I just said to you, you're living in the best time in all of human history. There is no comparison. I said, let me take you back 100 years ago, and let me describe to you what it would have been like 100 years ago, living in this exact same land. You would have still been in the most prosperous land in the world, but 100 years earlier. And I walked them through a few of the highlights. Let me share it with you, because I think here, even more so than where we live, since Chicago has been the second city of the nation for most of its existence, the dynamics of Chicago would not be that different from that of New York City, which was used as the, for instance. So in writing her book, she said, I'm going to use New York City as the largest city in the United States to give you an illustration of what it was like to live in a major city 100 years ago.

So this is, all of this is in the late 1800s, just as it's approaching 1900. 1900 itself, there were three and a half million people in New York City. Over a million and a half of them would have been classed as poor.

There's a flag flying already here. We lament the decline of the middle class. We lament the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. But demographically, demographically, we still have not declined to the place where demographers would say half of our people are classed as the poor.

Ask the question, where do these people live? Most of them lived in apartments, which were called either tenements or boarding houses. In New York City, 2,500 people lived in one block of tenement buildings. Now, I remember when I was in Michigan City, notorious to this area, in terms of where you didn't want to live, was Cabrini Green. So, in terms of a marker, as a comparison, take Cabrini, compare it to this. 2,500 people lived in one block of tenement buildings. Most tenements had four to six floors, so they were all four-story, five-story, or six-stories tall. Each floor had four apartments, and each apartment was made up of either two or three rooms. In those four apartments, with two or three rooms apiece, were on average 40 occupants. So, in those four apartments per floor, three rooms per apartment, if they all came out in the hall at one time, there'd be around 40 heads.

Some of them had no windows, and it doesn't matter whether you live in New York City or Chicago. You imagine yourself five stories up in a windowless apartment with no air conditioning, and that's your summer.

Those who lived on the backside, even though they may have had a window, they didn't get a whole lot of light because it was facing into the square, where all the tenements on the block backed up. They kept the windows shut in the winter because they couldn't breathe for the smoke and the soot of the factories and the smell of the odors. In the summertime, they had no option, so they traded fresh air for stench.

That's how over half of the people in New York City lived.

They asked the question, who took care of children? We had a snowstorm that came up all of a sudden, and they had school closures, and I looked at my wife and I said, you know, we're living in a day and a time where there are two people working in the family. Children must be in school because there's no one to take care of them, and the schools are shut, and you're going to have a whole bunch of kindergartners and first graders and second graders and third graders who have just been told there's no school today and no parents to take care of them.

1890, men and women worked 60 hours a week.

So there was no parental child care unless you had family members in addition. Younger siblings were taken care of by older siblings. If you had grandparents, they were taken care of by grandparents.

What did people eat?

The nearly half of the New Yorkers that I described, breakfast was made up of bread and tea. That was a common breakfast for a 60-hour work week.

Secondhand food markets.

You know, it's one thing to go to a secondhand clothing store. Secondhand food does not sound that appetizing. Secondhand food stores sold groceries and meats that were sometimes rotten. Some restaurants along the docks sold the food that was left over from people's plates in fancy restaurants. So you literally got secondhand food. What we scrape off and goes back in the dumpster was served in the fast food restaurant.

I only have one more to read you. I was reading this to family members, and I said, I can read it. I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the statement. I literally cannot wrap my head around it. But before I go there, I forgot one other thing. In those tenement houses, with 40 people to a floor, in the upper-class tenements, there was one bathroom per floor.

Those were the upper-class tenements. The lower-class tenements had an outhouse in the square behind the tenement.

Pity the person on the sixth floor. Sixth floor is down to the bathroom, sixth floor is up from the bathroom. And sixth floor is times four rooms per floor using the same outhouse.

What were the streets like? Last piece of the good old days. Garbage sometimes piled up four feet high. One visitor said that New York City looked like a huge, dirty stable. The main streets, such as Broadway, were a mess of noise, dirt, horse manure, and traffic.

They didn't install traffic lights in New York City until 1919.

Police primarily with the classic cartoon two-foot-long Trenchin.

That was used for breaking up traffic jams. If you couldn't break it up yourself, they broke it up on the top of your head.

And their public service, you could understand very well, and that kind of mess was helping older people cross streets that had no stop signs and no traffic lights. The streets were so bad that an expert was hired to solve the problem. It finally reached the place where New York City could no longer tolerate the state of their roads. The first law he made, so when the expert was hired to deal with the problem, the first law he made was, no carts and horses will be allowed to stand in the street overnight. So New York City became a city where stables were built throughout the city so that at night horses were not on the street and neither were their carts. Once that legislation had been passed, he then organized a street cleaning department in 1895. This is the part that I simply cannot wrap my head around. In 1995, he organized a street cleaning department to clean up the 60,000 gallons of horse urine and 2.5 million pounds of horse manure in the streets every day. Not once a week, every day.

Good old days.

I'm currently wading through, whenever I get around to it, one of Barbara Tuchman's books entitled The Distant Mirror, which is walking through the history of Europe in the 14th century.

Those people would have died to live in New York City, as I've just described it. They would have thought they had died and gone to heaven to be living in what I just described to you. You know, when I keep thanksgiving, brethren, I realize that God has blessed us regardless of whatever it is that's not good. And there's not a day goes by that we can't point out something that's not good. God has blessed us to live in the best time that man has had the privilege of living in. My wife and I went to a family vacation in Colorado, and I told her, I said, on the way I want to go through a community that I left when I was seven years old and haven't been back to since. My father was a railroad telegrapher, and the railroad telegraphers were on a seniority system, and when you had no seniority, you got what nobody else wanted. So the beginning of my childhood, school years, began in places that no one else in their right mind wanted to live. And then the first grade, I lived in the railroad station in a community that is no longer on the state maps. It is now officially a ghost town. I had no running water, no electricity, and the outhouse was about 50 yards down the right away from the railroad station.

With the mocking of children of today that I know, you walk uphill to school both directions, bare feet in the snow. No, head shoes on, snow only in the winter, and uphill only one way.

But I took my wife there and I said, I have to photograph the community. There's nothing there. The railroad station, the railroad, when it closes an area, it hauls everything away. I could tell by abandoned telegraph lines with a few glass insulators on it where the right away had been. And I photographed down what had been the right away both directions. The school I had attended, which was comprised of 12 kids in eight grades in one room, had burnt down three or four years earlier, so all I could photograph were the ashes of what was left.

Good old days.

There are no good old days. You're blessed right now to be living in about as good as it's ever been, even with whatever stinks. Still there.

To end the message, I'd like to give you just a few pieces of modern statistic to punctuate the point of living in the best that's ever been, but past the tipping point and moving down the hill. From the World Fact Book, which is published by the CIA, which gives a country comparison of infant mortality rates for all the nations on the Earth. Our lifestyle, our drug addiction, our family problems of all sorts that have produced broken homes and broken economies within families and broken senses of morality have cost us as a nation dearly. And as a result, our infant mortality rate is no longer the shining example for the world. Out of 224 nations that are on the CIA list and the 230...did I say 234? 224. The 224th has the best infant mortality rate, so the bottom is the best. If you're number one, it's because you got the worst. We're 174. Areas like the Faroe Islands, the North Marianas, New Caledonia, French Polynesia, even Cuba, San Marino, Taiwan, Portugal, and on and on we would go, have a better infant mortality rate than we do. We're 40th. We're 40 slots away from the best. But even 40 slots away from the best, we still only see less than six children per thousand die within the first year of their life. For every thousand American children born, six will die within the first year.

In the first 25, they will see at least 60 of their children per thousand die within the first year. And in the worst of the stack, they lose 10% of their children born every year. For every thousand children born in the nations at the bottom of the list, they will lose more than 100 children every single year among their one-year-olds. So even though we're 40 down, losing five children per thousand compared to losing 90 per thousand, relatively speaking, we are still phenomenally blessed.

Hunger is no longer a stranger to the United States. It's no longer a stranger to any of our cities or any of our communities. My wife retired from the school system a couple of years ago, and we talk about the number of kids that started their day with breakfast at the school and ended their day with a meal. I was watching a public television presentation about Detroit and about one of their schools that were for the physically and mentally challenged, where they had an agricultural program and they were growing produce for the school system. And they were providing breakfasts and lunches and sack dinners to take home, and even making sure on the last class on Friday that there was food sent home for the weekend. So we're not the shining light we once were, but relatively speaking, 870 million people in this world don't have enough to eat every day. 45% of the people that die each year on this planet don't die from disease. They die as primary cause from lack of food. They may be sick because of lack of food, but the primary cause of their death is nutritional. One out of six children on this planet, that's roughly 100 million children, are underweight because they don't have enough food to bring them up to weight. One in four children on this planet are stunted, growth-wise, because of lack of food. My father would look at me occasionally and say, I'm shorter than you are because I didn't have enough to eat. And as a younger kid, that was sort of humorous. As I got older and began to realize, I realized my dad was shorter than I is because he didn't have enough to eat. He said, my lunch when I went to school was a slice of bread and the spread was large. So it was a slice of bread with large, and that was lunch. I had no trouble looking at family pictures and realizing my grandfather and his brothers were all taller than my dad.

And all of the children of my generation are taller than my dad and my dad's younger brothers. So I understand this thing of stunting as a result of lack of food. 66 million primary school-age children attend classes hungry. 23 million of those are in Africa alone. Every day to school hungry. Life expectancy by country. Again, a lot of slippage on our part. There was a day in time, relatively speaking, where we were far higher up the ladder than we are now. We're 45th. There are 44 countries where people live longer than we do in terms of life expectancy. But again, it's all relative in that even among that group, all of them, relatively speaking, are blessed with longevity. At number 45, our life expectancy is 78 years. So the biblical, you are allowed 3 score and 10. And by reason of strength, 4 score. Our life expectancy is still just below 4 score. But when you get to some nations that are really just blips on the map, and Dora, and Tigua, and Macau, and San Marino, their life expectancy is all over 80 years. The last that I'll share with you is from the largest consumer database in the world called Numbio. And it's the Quality of Life Index by Country for the year 2013. For Quality of Life, they create the Quality of Life Index number by adding the results of purchasing index, safety index, health care index, consumer price index, property price to income ratio, traffic commute times, and pollution. And when all the countries of the world are looked at, and those are aggregated so that you have to take the composite of all of them, we're still number 3. I found it very interesting as I looked at the individual categories and how we rate it individually, that we sit at number 3 on the strength of things that constitute economic blessing to us as individuals. Because in regards to a safety index, we are way, way, way down the ladder when it comes to the safety of our citizens. Our safety index is half that of the safer nations. But our purchasing power, how far your dollar goes against whatever it is you want to buy, is still at the very top of the world. This is why Europeans come over here to buy. This is why Canadians, where we are, come across the border to buy. We are the cheap place. Our consumer price index, the price of goods relative to what our earnings are.

Our second only to Estonia. Switzerland's consumer price index is 146. Our's is 79. Half. It's been a long time since I've been in Switzerland. I remember going through when Bob and Bill Bradford and I and the others went through on our $5 a day. Then I took my wife through there for one of our anniversaries and I was sucking air the whole time we were in Switzerland going, We stayed in a hotel just outside of Interlaken and the breakfast was included. I remember eating breakfast and looking at my wife and a family across from us who were mounding their table with all the various breakfast items. And I said, you know what? Our breakfast, if we had come in off the street and had the breakfast we're eating right now, and it had not been included in our room cost, on an a la carte basis, your breakfast and mine would have been $50 for breakfast. We are the envy of the developed world when it comes to how cheap our property is compared to what we make. It doesn't feel that way as an American. Property to price ratio in the United States is 2.2, Switzerland 6, Germany 5, Denmark 6, Norway 7, Austria 8, Finland 9, doubles, triples, quadruples. My wife likes to watch the program about flipping houses or buying houses in Europe. I look at some of these ratty places they buy, and I say, what in the world are you buying? And then I look at the price tag, and I'm saying to myself, I can't wrap my head around it. So each year, brother, when Thanksgiving comes, it's a whole lot more than just a turkey dinner and family, which I thoroughly enjoy, both. But it's a recollection of the fact that I sit here at this table capable of appreciating what this day was intended to mean, beyond any other group or category people from the Pacific to the Atlantic and from the Canadian to the Mexican border. I know when it started. I know what the promises were. I know when I look at it, how it came to be. And all of it was a gift from God. When I was a kid before God called our family, we had a little family church in Caldwell, Idaho, that I attended. I still remember the color of the cover on the hymnal and a few of the hymns. One of the hymns that I've never forgotten was a hymn entitled, Counter Blessings. The chorus on that particular hymn is a good line to remember each year as we go through the Thanksgiving weekend. The first half of the refrain after every verse simply said, count your blessings. Name them one by one. Count your blessings. See what God has done.