Thanksgiving in the Highlands

Dear Friends,

How was your Thanksgiving? Mine found Kenneth and me shivering in the Scottish Highlands, watching a proper Atlantic storm try to blow the mountains into the sea. Romantic? Absolutely. Warm? Not even a little.

We gathered with a room full of lovely people—half American, half British—and feasted on roast turkey, dressing, gravy, plus the obligatory Scottish upgrades nobody asked for but everyone secretly loved: pigs-in-blankets and Brussels sprouts. I grew up in the South. My people consider green beans swimming in cream-of-mushroom soup a vegetable. Brussels sprouts were new territory.

The conversation was everything you’d expect: football (theirs and ours—two different games), the weather (apocalyptic), pets (superior to children, apparently), and whose third cousin twice-removed once herded sheep outside Inverness. Pleasant. Safe. Delightful.

And completely missing the point of the holiday.

A few years ago at a similar gathering, someone gave a nice little toast about the “Three Fs of Thanksgiving”: Family, Food, and Football. Cute, catchy, and—honestly?—a little heartbreaking. Because the original Thanksgiving had a gigantic fourth F that nobody in the room dared mention: Faith. God was not merely absent from the retelling; He had been deliberately edited out like a bad selfie.

Fast-forward to this year. I am invited to share my personal observations on Thanksgiving. Everything I feel about this special holiday – all within three minutes. I haven’t prepared that hard since grad school. Do I open with a joke? Ask a question? Just cry and sit down? In the end I decided the safest, sneakiest, most bullet-proof strategy was to let three dead presidents do the preaching for me. Nobody argues with the deceased—it’s unbecoming.

So here’s what happened: I smiled, thanked everyone for the lovely evening, and said, “Most of us know the three Fs: Family, Food, and Football. They’re all wonderful. But the F that matters most to me is the one we almost forgot tonight: Faith.” Then I let Washington, Lincoln, and Kennedy take the wheel.

George Washington, 1789: “Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey His will, to be grateful for His benefits…”

Abraham Lincoln, 1863—right in the middle of the Civil War: “I do invite my fellow-citizens… to set apart and observe the last Thursday of November as a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer to our Father who dwelleth in the heavens… and fervently implore the interposition of the Almighty Hand to heal the wounds of the nation…”

John F. Kennedy, 1963: “Today we give our thanks, most of all, for the ideals of honor and faith we inherit from our forefathers… [and] earnestly and humbly pray that He will continue to guide and sustain us…”

Three presidents. Multiple mentions of Almighty God, prayer, providence, and repentance—in official government proclamations. Try canceling that, Internet. I could feel the room holding its breath. So before anyone decided I’d ruined dessert, I looked right at the folks for whom faith isn’t part of their story and said, “Kenneth and I truly wish every single person here joy, health, and every good thing in the coming year—whether you share my faith or not.” And because I didn’t want to leave on a purely churchy note, I added a fifth F: Face Forward. Four hundred years ago a few scared families climbed into wooden ships and pointed their faces toward an uncertain future. Maybe that’s our call as we head into 2026—leave the baggage, press on, dare mighty things. (I even tossed in a Teddy Roosevelt quote for good measure, because apparently I was feeling invincible.)

I sat down wondering if I had just committed social suicide with cranberry sauce on the side. Instead? Person after person found me later—quietly, privately—and said, “Thank you. I needed that reminder.” One man who describes himself as “not religious at all” squeezed my hand and whispered, “That was beautiful.”

Friends, if God can use a nervous woman clutching a microphone in a Scottish dining room to slip Jesus back into a Thanksgiving conversation without starting an international incident, imagine what He can do with you—at the school-board meeting, the university lecture hall, the corporate diversity training, the ballot box, or even your own family table. What our country needs right now is not more outrage, not louder shouting, not better memes. What we need is courage—specifically the courage of ordinary Christians to bring our faith back into the public square with wisdom, gentleness, and the unmistakable anointing of the Holy Spirit. We are not called to stand out like self-righteous peacocks. We are called to stand up—like watchmen on the wall, like Esther “for such a time as this,” like the early believers who turned the world upside down not by being obnoxious, but by being unflinchingly brave about the One who changed everything. Education, welfare, politics, military, medicine, media, arts—there is no sphere of human life that Jesus does not claim as His own. And there is no sphere where His people are excused from speaking truth in love.

So take your stand for Christ. Be brave. Not because the culture will throw you a parade (it probably won’t), but because the One who sees in secret is keeping score, and history is still His story. Thanksgiving isn’t a Thursday. It’s a declaration: that every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, and that one day every knee will bow to the King those first Pilgrims crossed an ocean to worship freely. Until that day, let’s keep raising our hands—even when they shake.

Still giving thanks (and recovering from Brussels sprouts),
Angela

P.S. “Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” —1 Thessalonians 5:18