Before 1863, there was no national Thanksgiving Day. Each state picked its own date, mostly in New England and the North. Sarah Josepha Hale, a 74-year-old magazine editor, had been pushing for one national day of thanks for 15 years as editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and several presidents had simply ignored her. On September 28, 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, she wrote President Lincoln asking that Thanksgiving be made a national and fixed Union festival. Lincoln acted right away. On October 3, 1863, he issued a proclamation setting apart the last Thursday of November “as a day of Thanksgiving and Praise to our beneficent Father who dwelleth in the Heavens.” The proclamation even admits the blessings were “so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come.” One woman’s persistence gave a whole nation a day to remember where the good gifts come from.
David Livingstone spent his childhood working 14 hours a day in a cotton mill. He trained to be a medical missionary to China, but the Opium War shut that door. Then he heard Robert Moffat describe “the smoke of a thousand villages where no missionary had been before,” and he went to Africa. Things were hard. His only convert in those early years went back to his old ways. Livingstone was not an easy man, and he fought with many fellow workers. Still, he kept pressing into the interior to open what he called God’s Highway. Years later, worn out and lost in swamps, he died in a mud hut, kneeling beside his cot in prayer. He ended his race the way he ran it.
Hudson Taylor carried a burden for the millions in China’s interior who had never heard the gospel. But he was terrified of sending men and women unprotected into the unknown. In 1865 he wrote in his diary that the conflict was so intense he thought he would lose his mind. A friend invited him to Brighton on the English coast for a break. Walking along the beach, his gloom lifted. He wrote, “There the Lord conquered my unbelief, and I surrendered myself to God for this service.” He left the consequences with God. Within a year Taylor, his family and sixteen young missionaries sailed for China. Obedience gets easier when we hand God the responsibility for results.
Andrew van der Bijl grew up poor in the Netherlands and lived through the 1944 famine, when he ate tulip bulbs to survive. After he gave his life to God, he began reaching believers behind the Iron Curtain. In 1955 he slipped away from a government tour of Poland to visit underground churches. In 1957 he made his first smuggling run into Yugoslavia, with Bibles hidden in his blue Volkswagen. Watching guards search the cars ahead, he prayed, “When you were on Earth, you made blind eyes see. Now, I pray, make seeing eyes blind.” His story became the 1967 book God’s Smuggler, and the world knew him as Brother Andrew. He died in 2022 at 94. God still opens doors that look locked tight.
