Each year we celebrate Thanksgiving in the tradition of the Plymouth colony’s harvest at the end of their first year in the New World, 1621. Did these early settlers have cause to thank an Almighty God for their condition? Consider the following facts: The Pilgrims did not come to America to seek religious freedom.

“It was the love letters—that’s what really helped.” I was having a conversation with a military wife who had struggled for years through an unhappy marriage—but had seen that marriage turn around, slowly at first, because of changes that only God could have brought about.

On the basis of his reading of the Scriptures, Matthew Fontaine Maury knew from Psalm 8:8, Ecclesiastes 1:6, and Psalm 107:23-24 that God designed and ordered the elements of nature which had fascinated him in his experience at sea and in his subsequent study. Maury contended that whoever studies the sea “must look upon it as a part of that exquisite machinery by which the harmonies of nature are preserved, and then will begin to perceive the developments of order and the evidences of design.” (2)  It was on the basis of his belief in the truth of Scripture that Maury made the scientific conclusions that he did. Born in 1806, this man of God went on to be known as "The Father of Modern Oceanography."