If we’d all been as careful as we were strongly encouraged to be, or just lucky, Thanksgiving Day 2020 might well have been a day to remember as the Thanksgiving Day when the family and friends we love most were with us or at least as near as their phones. Tragically, far too many won’t remember spending Thanksgiving Day 2020 knowing that the people they loved most were, for at least that day, safe and well. For them, Thanksgiving Day 2020 is more likely to become a lasting memory of utter fear and, for far too many, a lasting nightmare of loss.

The nation’s leading scientists pleaded with us to stay home and limit the number of family members and friends we’d share our turkey with. Too many didn’t need to be warned. They couldn’t afford to buy gas, much less a plane or even a bus ticket to travel to be with family members. If they were last in the long lines at churches and food banks, they may well not have even had a turkey dinner.

The good news is that vaccines have been approved and will soon begin being distributed, starting with health care workers. Without them, few, if any of us, would survive life-threatening illnesses, not to mention car wrecks, falls, or the violence that grips our beloved country. The bad news is that many, if not most of us, are still scared. 

For far too many, despite the amazing outpouring of help from ordinary people trying to make sure that no one goes hungry in America, especially at Thanksgiving, it is highly likely to be remembered as the day when they were still hungry and/or terrified of being evicted. On the other hand, approximately half a million people were already sleeping in emergency shelters or transitional housing or in places “not meant for human habitation.”

Like no Thanksgiving in recent memory, COVID-19 will, without a doubt, leave far fewer people to celebrate Christmas 2020, and future Thanksgiving Day holidays for God only knows how long. Even if we haven’t lost a loved one to the deadly virus, even coming close is terrifying. Too many weren’t that lucky. I was. One of my three sons, all of whom were, and still are diligent about taking every precaution to avoid COVID-1, survived a bad case, plus a stroke, and had been hospitalized for 9 weeks. Thank God and the nurses and physical, occupational, and speech therapists who worked with him, he is well enough to be back at the job he loves at FedEx. Like most of the people he works with, he’s working from home, just as he was when COVID-19 came to America and blew up any claims we’d ever made of our country being invincible.

May God bless each and every person who reads this, and hold you and those you love in the palm of His hand.