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For those of us who voted against Donald Trump, celebrating Thanksgiving Day seems eerily similar to the first Thanksgiving celebrated in Plymouth, Massachusetts by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in November, 1621.

The Pilgrims had survived the winter of 1620 and had a successful harvest in the fall of 1621. They were also at peace with the Wampanoags who had occupied the land for a thousand years.

A moment to be thankful seemed appropriate to William Bradford and the other Pilgrim leaders, not because everything was good, but because they were alive and had food and lodging.

Circumstances changed as thousands more immigrants arrived. Disease wiped out half the population of Pilgrims and fights among themselves over land became common. Still, periods of thanksgiving persisted.

That is a good reminder that Thanksgiving arises from the good within people rather than the circumstances surrounding them.

For us this year we will pause this Thursday as a thankful people amid deep unrest and division in the country. In spite of it all, I still feel a deep gratitude for being American.

Many months ago I quoted a Canadian lawyer who made the offhand comment in a letter to a friend that “Americans have a long way to go to become the people many of them think they already are.”

I think what he said is true, and I believe we are working to meet that challenge, and on Thanksgiving I will give thanks for the progress we continue to make in that direction.

We clearly have a ways to go, as I believe the rise in hate crimes and bullying of minority school children by racists and white nationalists since the election of Donald Trump underscores.

While Trump may slow progress in becoming the nation most of us want to be, he will not be able to stop it.

What is more, wherever Trump’s vision for our country runs counter to the one the rest of us have, there will be renewed resistance, and that, too, is reason to be thankful this year.

That is the lesson we can learn from that gathering in Plymouth that we now call the first Thanksgiving. For them mere survival was reason enough to stop what they were doing and thank God for their lives individually and their life together as a community.

We have survived this year and this year’s election, and have prospered in so many other ways, making it just as appropriate for us to stop what we are doing and thank God for our lives individually and our life together as a nation.

It would be so much easier to give in to despair and discouragement, anger and resentment, but that would ignore the good life we Americans enjoy.

And it would be to give up on the hard work of becoming the kind of nation we know deep down we have not yet become, but can.

So while it is true that all is not right with the world, I believe enough is to remind all of us that gratitude never depends on circumstances, but on the heart.

That is why, in spite of what is happening at the moment, Thanksgiving Day will be a special time in the life of our nation this year as it has been since the beginning.