On Thanksgiving Day in 1944, a young American platoon sergeant named Mac St. Johns led his men on a scouting mission in the French countryside. They were looking for German soldiers known to be in the area. Heading toward a crossroads under the faint light of dawn, Mac “stood stark still” and argued with himself about what to do next. He knew that he should have his men “fan out so that they could move with the cover of the trees” in the surrounding forest. But a voice in his head told him not to do so. After some hesitation, he chose to walk his men down the road in a single column. Though they were exposed, no Germans fired. In fact, Mac and his men encountered no German resistance near the crossroads at all.
Turning around to return to camp, they quickly realized how close they had come to death. Nailed to the backs of the trees, German signs warned, “Minen!” Had they moved through the woods earlier that morning, they would have been “blown to bits.”
Weeks later in mid-December, Mac got a letter from his mother. “Can you remember where you were on Thanksgiving Day?” she asked. His mother explained that she had awakened just after midnight with a sense of terror. “I had a strong feeling that you were in great danger. When I opened my Bible, a phrase in Second Chronicles [20:17] gleamed on the page: ‘Stand ye still and see the salvation of the Lord with you…’” Stand…ye…still. Mac had definitely received his mother’s Thanksgiving message.
I came across Mac’s story in this collection of inspiring Thanksgiving miracles. It spoke to me because I have had my share of similar moments in life — when a whisper stopped me in my tracks and moved me in a different direction. In each of those instances, the choice before me seemed small, but the voice inside my head insisted that it would be consequential. That voice has always been right. So it is in this world: sometimes a single step is our undoing, and sometimes a single step is our salvation. When you hear an unexpected whisper, it’s best to listen.
We don’t always listen, though, do we? Sometimes we ignore any misgivings and continue down our original path. And when those choices burn us down the road, we have an even more consequential decision to make: do we let our past mistakes define our futures, or do we use our newly gained wisdom to defeat challenges yet to come?
It is not easy to admit when we’ve been wrong. It is even harder to find peace when our bad decisions harm others. It is tempting to cover up one bad choice with another. You do that enough times, though, and you eventually realize that you’ve done nothing but bury important truths.
When I was younger, a wise man told me to be thankful for my regrets. “Thankful?” I remember thinking in disbelief. I preferred to carry my regrets like weights around my neck. I refused to let them go. Living like that means living with inconsolable pain. But there was something else that old philosopher said that stuck with me: your regrets give you a chance to be a better person today than you were yesterday. Be thankful for your regrets, he argued, because they are the instruments that mold our character. Use your pain to grow, or your pain will one day use you up. Some of the best people around us have profound regrets. Often, it is their profound regret that has shaped them into such morally excellent people.
Be thankful for the hard lessons. Wisdom is rarely obtained with ease. If it were, everyone around us would be wise. Wise people stand out because wisdom comes with a cost. We humans all suffer in one form or another. Only some of us, however, learn to use that suffering to become better versions of ourselves.
Sometimes bits of wisdom seem contradictory. In a single evening with friends, you might hear one argue, “People never change,” and another insist, “People do change.” Are our natures set in stone from the moment we enter this world, or are we capable of real, substantial growth? I have always been fond of what the Ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus had to say on the matter: “A man’s character is his fate.” Who we are affects our decisions, and our decisions ultimately affect our futures.
But think about the advice from the old wise man I mentioned above who encouraged me to be thankful for my regrets. If our character is shaped by how we handle our regrets, then surely we have some measure of control over our fates. Perhaps the more we understand about ourselves, the more capable we become of creating our own futures.
There have been only a few times in my life when I was near someone who gave me the shivers. If you’ve ever found yourself around such a person, it is difficult not to believe in the existence of evil. Aside from truly evil human beings, though, most people are capable of doing both bad and good things. You can take a boy without a family, give him a gun, and tell him to protect his neighborhood gang. Awful acts soon follow. You can give a boy a family, help him learn from his mistakes, and encourage him to protect his community. The same boy becomes a selfless police officer. Often, it is not a question of whether we humans change or not but rather how we channel our inherent natures. When we are wise enough to learn from our mistakes and listen to those who wish to help us, we become better people.
As Mac St. Johns’s Thanksgiving Day story from WWII shows, sometimes the difference between life and death is a steadfast faith in God. Will we listen when He whispers, or will we walk the other way? Will we allow Him to shape our character, or will we insist on doing so without His help? So much is at stake. At any moment, we might face the most consequential decision of our lives.
As we celebrate Thanksgiving this year, many of us are also celebrating President Trump’s election victory. Something has been rotten in America for quite some time. Our national borders, shared history, and common love for freedom have been disappearing. Multinational corporations and international bureaucrats have long exerted more influence over our country’s direction than the people who call America home. Our national debt is unsustainable. Our government is corrupt. Our Constitution is ignored. Our Union is divided. Our culture is vulgar. Our moral compass is broken. President Trump’s return to office offers the prospect of needed change.
The questions now are straightforward: will we learn from our past mistakes? Will we admit that we have sometimes taken the wrong path as a nation, caused unnecessary harm, and hurt ourselves? Will we stop covering up one bad choice with another? Will we make use of our suffering and grow stronger? Will we learn from painful experiences and gain wisdom? Will we choose to be thankful for our many regrets?
A country’s character is its fate, too. Any country is capable of both tremendous good and shocking atrocity. Any country can nurture its people’s best impulses or exacerbate its people’s worst instincts. Any country can submit to evil or seek God’s guidance and forgiveness.
If we have been given a second chance this year, let us be supremely grateful. Let us be penitent. Let us demonstrate wisdom. Let us harness the best parts of our natures. Let this be the first of many joyous Thanksgivings to come. Above all else: let us be still…and listen.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.