Ministering Sisters

(This chapter contains good, solid marital advice for emotionally healthy individuals. It is not good advice where physical, verbal, emotional, or sexual abuse is involved. If the abuser is not willing to get help, the advice that follows isn't enough.)             Our back living room window looks at Grandeur Peak , which is east of Salt Lake City, where we have lived for more than forty years. From time to time family members have lamented that Grandeur Peak was not more like Mount Olympus, which is about a mile to the south and grander than Grandeur Peak in every way. Mount Olympus is about eight hundred feet higher, has much more vegetation with thousands of stately pines, and has a noble-looking summit. In comparison, Grandeur Peak is barren, rounded, and plain. However, an imperceptible change has incrementally been occurring, and last fall it became a topic of conversation. For the first time, our family and visitors looked out the window in awe. The...

            Every fourth Thursday of November, American families gather to eat turkey and watch football. The holiday is called Thanksgiving. The prevailing reason for Thanksgiving is to remember the Pilgrims’ feast after their plentiful harvest of 1621. But the first and sixteenth presidents of the United States declared a loftier purpose for the holiday.             President George Washington issued a proclamation in November 1789. He declared a day of “public thanksgiving and prayer” devoted to “the service of that great and glorious Being who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be” (See heritage.org/washingtons-thanksgiving-proclamation ).             In 1864, President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving a national holiday. In his proclamation, he expressed gratitude for: “the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies”; the population increase and...