Every November, we sit around tables loaded with food, watch football, and joke about eating too much turkey. We call it Thanksgiving. But if we’re honest, for many of us, it’s more about the “giving” (food, time off, maybe a little gratitude for family) than genuine thanks to the God who sustains us.
Yet the first Thanksgiving in America was born out of something very different: suffering, near-starvation, and desperate dependence on God. If we’re going to call America back to gratitude and dependence on the Lord, we need to remember how it all started. To recover true Thanksgiving, we must remember what it means to truly depend on God.
This isn’t a perfect story about perfect people. It’s a story about flawed men and women who faced unbelievable hardship, cried out to God, and saw His hand in ways that are hard to ignore.
A Journey That Almost Didn’t Happen
The story starts in England, with a small congregation who wanted the freedom to worship God according to His Word. They weren’t trying to start a holiday. They were trying to follow Christ.
Two ships were set to carry them: the Mayflower and the Speedwell. The Speedwell suffered problems from the beginning. It failed three times, springing leaks and forcing them back to port again and again. They tried one last time and got about 300 miles out into the Atlantic before the Speedwell failed yet again.
At that point, they had a choice: give up, or press on with fewer people and one ship. In the end, fewer than 40 from the original congregation could go. Families were split. Dreams were delayed. Some never made the journey at all.
On September 6, 1620, the Mayflower finally left England, weeks late and deep into the dangerous season. Most of the passengers had already been living on the cramped ship for about six weeks while things were being prepared. The voyage itself should have taken around three weeks. Instead, it took over two months.
Imagine: 102 passengers, about 30 crew, horrid conditions, sickness, storms, and fear. Along the way, the main beam of the ship broke in the middle of the ocean. By all natural logic, the voyage should have ended in tragedy right there.
But it didn’t.
They managed to repair the beam using an iron screw one of them had brought. They saw it as a miracle. And honestly, given their situation, it’s hard to argue.
Not Where They Planned, But Where God Led
The plan was to land near the Hudson River, in what we now know as Virginia. Instead, storms drove them off course, and they arrived at Cape Cod in modern-day New England.
They tried to sail south toward their intended destination but nearly wrecked in the dangerous shoals. So they turned back to Cape Cod. There, they spent about six weeks exploring, trying to figure out where to settle.
On December 25, 1620, they finally began building. Their first building, their first offering in a sense, was a meeting house. It was a place for worship, counsel, and community. Before they finished, winter hit hard.
The women and children stayed on the ship at night. The men slept on the frozen ground as they worked during the day. That first winter, almost half of them died.
This is the part we often skip over when we go straight to images of turkeys and feasts. Before there was Thanksgiving, there was grief. There were fresh graves in frozen ground. There were families who had left everything behind, only to bury spouses, children, and friends in a strange land.
Yet they didn’t turn from God. They turned to Him.
And in their moment of greatest vulnerability, help walked out of the woods.
A Stranger Walks Out of the Woods
Spring came. One day, a Native American walked into their settlement and greeted them in English.
His name was Samoset, a member of the Wampanoag tribe. He had learned English from fishermen who had visited the area. To the Pilgrims, this was nothing short of astounding.
About a week later, Samoset brought another man to meet them: Tisquantum, better known to us as Squanto.
Squanto’s story is one of the most remarkable in early American history. He had been taken captive by Englishmen years earlier and sold into slavery in Spain. There, Christian monks intervened, helped secure his freedom, and taught him English and the Bible.
Eventually, Squanto made his way to England, then back across the Atlantic to his homeland. When he returned, he found his village destroyed by disease. He was, in many ways, a man without a people.
Somewhere in that long and difficult journey, Squanto came to faith in Christ. And now, standing in front of a fragile, half-starved group of English settlers, he chose to help them rather than hate them.
He taught them how to fish for cod, plant corn using fish as fertilizer, hunt deer, grow pumpkins, skin beavers, and identify which berries were safe to eat.
Governor William Bradford later wrote that Squanto was “a special instrument sent of God for [our] good… and never left [us] till he died.”
It’s hard not to see the parallel. In many ways, Squanto was like an American Joseph. He was sold, enslaved, carried far from home, and then used by God to save others from starvation.
Suffering, then providence. Loss, then unexpected mercy. That’s the real soil in which Thanksgiving grew.
The First Thanksgiving
Because of what Squanto taught them, the next planting season looked very different.
By the fall of 1621, the Pilgrims had something they hadn’t seen in a long time: a bountiful harvest.
One of them, Edward Winslow, wrote, “God be praised… we are… far from want.” That simple phrase says so much. They didn’t credit their own ingenuity, bravery, or toughness. They looked at the harvest and said, “God did this.”
They declared a three-day feast of Thanksgiving.
About 90 Wampanoag Indians joined them, along with about 50 surviving Pilgrims. They ate shellfish, lobster, turkey, corn bread, berries, deer, and more. They held races, wrestling matches, and other sports. They prayed. They laughed. They remembered all they had been through.
It wasn’t a sanitized, storybook event. It was a gathering of people who had walked through death and near-starvation, and now stood surrounded by evidence that God had not abandoned them.
When the Rains Stopped
The challenges didn’t end with that first Thanksgiving.
In 1623, a severe drought hit the fledgling Plymouth colony. The fields dried up. The crops began to fail. At one point, rations were said to be as low as five kernels of corn per person, per day.
Imagine gathering your family, placing five kernels of corn on each plate, and saying grace. That’s not abundance. That’s desperation.
Governor Bradford didn’t call for more clever strategies or political alliances. He called for prayer and fasting, a collective turning to God for mercy and rain.
And the rain came.
That year, they again experienced a bountiful harvest. This time, they gathered with about 120 Native braves plus their wives and children. The tables were filled with an abundance of food.
And they didn’t forget the drought. Tradition (though not all historians agree on the exact details) says that they first commemorated the five kernels, remembering how near they had come to famine and how faithful God had been.
From five kernels to overflowing plates. From icy graves to grateful feasts. From starvation to songs of praise.
What This Means for Us
We live in a very different America now, but some things haven’t changed as much as we think.
We still face uncertainty. We still experience loss. We still struggle with division, fear, and anxiety about the future. We’re tempted to trust our technology, our politics, or our own strength more than God. These things have their place, but they make terrible gods.
The story behind Thanksgiving reminds us of a few things we must never forget:
God often works through hardship before He brings harvest.
The Pilgrims saw miracles, but those miracles came in the middle of storms, broken beams, disease, and drought. Our discomfort doesn’t mean God has abandoned us. Sometimes it’s where His work is most clearly seen.
Gratitude grows best in the soil of dependence.
When you’re living on five kernels a day, you don’t take a full plate for granted. When you’ve buried loved ones, you don’t treat another day of life as automatic. We’ve grown used to abundance in America, and sometimes that abundance has dulled our sense of dependence on God. Where have we grown more used to our “harvest” than aware of our need for Him?
God raises up “Josephs” and “Squantos” in every generation.
Squanto’s story is painful and unjust in many ways. Yet God used it for good, to save lives, to bridge cultures, and to point people to Christ. Even in our own day, God is at work through unlikely people in unlikely ways.
True Thanksgiving points beyond the gift to the Giver.
The Pilgrims didn’t just celebrate “harvest.” They celebrated the God who gave the harvest. Their hearts echoed a truth later expressed in James 1:17: “Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above.” The first Thanksgiving was deeply aware of that truth.
A Call Back to True Thanksgiving
We don’t need to whitewash history or pretend the Pilgrims did everything right. They didn’t. No people ever have. But we also shouldn’t ignore the powerful ways God moved in those early days.
In a moment when many are cynical about America’s past, we can be honest about the sins and failures, and still give thanks for the moments of courage, faith, and providence that helped shape this nation.
This Thanksgiving, maybe we start with something simple and quiet:
- Remember where we’d be without God’s mercy.
- Acknowledge the “five kernels” seasons of our own lives, those days when we were near the edge and He carried us.
- Give thanks, not just for food and family, but for the God who has sustained us, individually and as a people.
We can’t control what the nation as a whole will do. But we can decide, in our homes and hearts, to return to a deeper, more honest Thanksgiving. One that looks a lot more like that first gathering in 1621: humbled, grateful, and aware that every breath, every harvest, every answered prayer is a gift.
May we, like Edward Winslow, be able to say this year, “God be praised… we are… far from want.” Not because everything is easy, but because God has been faithful.
Want to read more? Check out: Thanksgiving Can Change Your Life