Spero Consulting

God Bless the Queen!

We sit here writ­ing while our Queen and Chair­man, Jill, is simul­ta­ne­ously: bak­ing pump­kin pie; sautee­ing Shi­itake mush­rooms for her “turkey” stuff­ing, which isn’t actu­ally baked in the turkey; chop­ping and com­bin­ing herbs to place inside the turkey (to fla­vor it); trac­ing Lucy’s hand-​print on paper to use as a stencil/​cut-​out “turkey” for the left-​over pie crust; and form­ing that crust into var­i­ous cin­na­moned treats.

Observ­ing that effort, and recall­ing all of yesterday’s effort – prepar­ing the turkey so that it can sit in the fridge “airing-​out” over overnight, mak­ing gravy from the giblets, boil­ing the cran­ber­ries for sauce – along with every other day’s effort all year long, makes us truly grate­ful and thank­ful that she is both our part­ner and wife. Thank you, Lord!

God Bless America!

We are also quite thank­ful to have be born and to have lived in this great nation.

The United States, and what it rep­re­sents, still remain the pin­na­cle of civ­i­liza­tion and human achieve­ment and the best wishes and dreams of mankind. Much of that is due to the nation’s Found­ing Fathers and their intel­li­gence and wis­dom to design appro­pri­ate checks-​and-​balances on power, to con­sider the inher­ent Fallen Nature of Man in their plans for a nation, and their empiri­cism to have learned from the mis­takes of pre-​1776 his­tory. (We only won­der, of course, why oth­ers – includ­ing some of our own cur­rent, gov­ern­ment ser­vants – have not learned that les­son? For more on that, please see last year’s Thanks­giv­ing mes­sage.)

We often remark to our girls that they need to real­ize and appre­ci­ate both their his­toric and geo­graphic good for­tune. Of all of the peo­ple who have ever been born, say 10 bil­lion or so, to be born now – with med­i­cine, equal rights, toi­let paper, nutri­tion, oppor­tu­nity, tech­nol­ogy, etc – com­pared to almost any­one in any past era and to be born here – with all those right and priv­i­leges that still do not exist through­out the world – is luck and bless­ing beyond mere good fortune.

Whether through time or through space, con­sider the truly minus­cule odds of being born to such bounty and free­dom. Thank you, Lord!

God Bless the Grown-​ups!

With that free­dom and bounty comes the adult respon­si­bil­ity to main­tain and defend it. So, thank God for the sol­diers, sailors, marines, and all the ser­vice men and women – past and present – who put them­selves in harm’s ways for their fam­ily, friends, and hundreds-​of-​millions of per­fect strangers.

But, we are thank­ful for more than just those who are will­ing to bear arms for our and the nation’s ben­e­fit and defense. As we wrote recently in, The Fallen Nature of Par­ents & Kids’ Sport:

The other remark­able thing worth men­tion­ing is that through­out the coun­try, there are tens of thou­sands of (gen­er­ally) semi-​gray and semi-​wrinkled vol­un­teers who are will­ing – usu­ally as politely as pos­si­ble – to soothe and/​or rep­ri­mand those who behave child­ishly. Most don’t sign up for it but still do it when they learn its their respon­si­bil­ity. We project – in a strict psy­cho­log­i­cal sense – and joke that they do it as penance: per­haps con­sciously, per­haps not.

Seri­ously, thank God for them and God bless them as they do their gen­er­ally unno­ticed and under-​appreciated work of attempt­ing to help par­ents grow up. We don’t think that it is an over­state­ment to say their efforts help keep soci­ety func­tion­ing, and they most cer­tainly help keep it civil.

The more that we meet and inter­act with such folks – those who use their time, intel­li­gence, wis­dom and energy – do to the right for oth­ers at (1) no expec­ta­tion of direct or indi­rect per­sonal ben­e­fit and (2) often at sub­stan­tial per­sonal cost, the more grate­ful that we become (and the more it seems that the Holy Spirit is quite present on earth and in their hearts and minds).

It is that mature self-​sufficiency and ini­tia­tive and effort to take and/​or enforce the decent and right and respon­si­ble and hon­or­able action that makes the vast major­ity of the country’s var­i­ous types of com­mu­ni­ties suc­cess­fully func­tion – both indi­vid­u­ally and aggre­gately, and it is beau­ti­ful. Thank you, Lord!

Happy Thanks­giv­ing!

We pray that in the future our nation con­tin­ues to exist in such a way that we can con­tinue to be thank­ful for the accu­mu­lated ben­e­fits of the indi­vid­ual effort and love, and that it is not destroyed by sense­less and poorly-​considered gov­ern­ment programs.

In our mind, an insuf­fi­cient gov­ern­ment leads to dis­trust and trib­al­ism and a soci­etal and national “pie” sub­stan­tially smaller than the sum-​of-​its-​parts, while too much gov­ern­ment destroys per­sonal ini­tia­tive and much of what we cher­ish and men­tion above. Thereby, again, result­ing in a whole less than the the sum-​of-​its part, and we are clearly not writ­ing of merely finan­cial issues.¹

So, beyond our per­sonal grat­i­tude for fam­ily and friends and acquain­tances and good for­tune, per last year’s mes­sage we thank God for the pil­grims who learned from their early col­lec­tivist mis­takes to show that a bet­ter world could exist; we thank God for this nation’s founders who learned from oth­ers’ mis­takes and cre­ated this most, truly Chris­t­ian of nations from which every­one ben­e­fits; and we thank God for every­one – past and present, stranger and acquain­tance and friend – who has or had the unhar­nessed oppor­tu­nity and the love and the energy to do (and show) what is right. That is why this exper­i­ment con­tin­ues to work (and shows that at least socially, under the right con­di­tions, a per­pet­ual motion machine exists.)

Happy Thanks­giv­ing!

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