November 2025

Dear Friends,

If April showers bring May flowers, what do May flowers bring? Pilgrims.

I remember the day my brother came home from elementary school and told me this little joke. It would have been about 1960 at a time when people put out their cornucopias, paper pilgrims and turkeys. There were always the standard stories of the pilgrims’ arrival in 1620 and the first thanksgiving. Through the years I have learned that these events have been exaggerated, embellished and sometimes purely fabricated yet still there remains a fascination with the original story. While exactly all the pilgrims did may be open to varying interpretations, the essential gist of the story is quite factual. They were people who came here as they believed they were directed to by God. They came to find a new promised land, a place where God would freely bless them as they industriously worked the land under His auspices. They were at a certain level utopianists, many of them with leanings toward amillennialism/post-millennialism who believed that God would usher in a golden age of harmony if they would remain faithful to their religious expression now liberated from the fetters of Kings.

The pilgrims could never have realized what their experiment would yield. The present colossus would not even have been possible in their view. Still the present manifestation is what came of the “pilgrim dream”. However the dream isn’t yet concluded. There is a future still to be realized and that future is in the hand of the same God the pilgrims worshipped in freedom, the one to whom they offered thanks for bounty and providence. The lesson of the pilgrims isn’t found in their history as much as in their confidence. Confidence to face the future guided by the hand of the true God, this is the legacy the pilgrims left to their descendants and we are misguided if we give in to the present spirit of pessimism that permeates a faithless age and lines the pockets of those who market their dark vision without conscience. So Psalm 121:  

I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. 2 My help cometh from the LORD, which made heaven and earth. 3 He will not suffer thy foot to be moved: he that keepeth thee will not slumber. 4 Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. 5 The LORD is thy keeper: the LORD is thy shade upon thy right hand. 6 The sun shall not smite thee by day, nor the moon by night. 7 The LORD shall preserve thee from all evil: he shall preserve thy soul. 8 The LORD shall preserve thy going out and thy coming in from this time forth, and even for evermore. (Psalm 121:1-8 KJV)

God remains with us. The pilgrims were right; we are wise to trust in Him. Happy Thanksgiving!

God’s Peace,

Jay Weidner