11-26-15 - Thanksgiving

I’ll keep it short today – you are no doubt busy with dinner preparations, or busy doing nothing at all, or both (those not being incompatible states…).

I once asked a wise person how to cultivate joy, which is not my strong suit. And he said, “Joy grows out of gratitude." So I’ve made an effort to foster an attitude of gratitude, as they say, to lead with thankfulness for what is, before I focus on what’s missing. So here are a few Thanksgiving Day thankfulnesses:

First, I want to say how grateful I am for this Water Daily community of readers, thinkers, commentators and pray-ers. I don’t know exactly how many or who reads this on any given day, and I don’t get a response each day. But some readers drop a note often enough to give me a sense that this is a conversation, even if I’m doing most of the talking.

And I am grateful for the opportunity to write this thing every day. Some days, the writing gets jammed into a half-hour toward the end of the day, and some days I know exactly what I’m supposed to write and it comes flowing forth. The best days are when I didn’t know, and the Holy Spirit surprises me. Unsurprisingly, those are often the best posts and receive the most feedback.

No matter what the process, it gives me a chance to engage with the gospel text for Sunday, and allows creativity to flow from the parts of my consciousness that don’t always get the air time they should.

And I am grateful that these words help some preachers to connect with the passage in fresh ways, and some congregants to better appreciate the sermons they hear on Sunday. God is so all over this whole process, it makes me smile just to think of the space we’re giving the Spirit to play!

I wish you a blessed and restful and delicious Thanksgiving Day with loved ones, your own sweet self, and the Spirit of God.

And... unless the Spirit gives me something else to say about this Sunday's gospel reading, I'm not going to post anything Friday. I'm going to walk and digest Thursday's dinner!

Oh - and here's a link to an op-ed I wrote about welcoming refugees, printed in the Stamford Advocate on Wednesdsay this week, co-signed by several valued clergy colleagues.