Dear All,
Another week of Eastertide has gone by & our theme this week is gratitude. I hope you have something or many things, someone or many people, to feel grateful for. And we hope the attachments will throw some new light on gratitude or just remind us of all the good things or people for which we are grateful.
Our musical blessing, this week is a Celtic one – again it is Margaret Rizza, this time from her ‘Lighten our Darkness’ CD.
With our love
Thanksgiving
Iona
Gracious God
for your love for us
gentle as a shower
healing our pain
binding our wounds
WE GIVE YOU THANKS
For your love for us
sure as the dawn
transforming our darkness
revealing your truth
WE GIVE YOU THANKS
For your love for us
mercifully steadfast
calling us to you
raising us up
WE GIVE YOU THANKS
For your love for us
encouraging questions
open to doubts
making us vulnerable
WE GIVE YOU THANKS
Urge us on, O Christ
to find wholeness
through serving you
by serving others
in the power of your spirit
A Prayer of Gratitude
Joyce Rupp
We are grateful for eyes that can see and ponder, for taste buds that know the sensuous pleasures of eating and drinking, for hands that hold and touch and feel, for ears that can delight in music and the voice of a friend, for a nose that can smell the aroma of newly mown grass or delicious food, and can also breathe the air that gives us life.
We are grateful for the treasure of loved ones whose hearts of openness and acceptance have encouraged us to be who we are. We are grateful for their faithfulness, for standing by us when our weaknesses stood out glaringly, for being there when we were most in need and for delighting with us in our good days and our joyful seasons.
We are grateful for the eyes of faith, for believing in the presence of God, giving us hope in our darkest days, encouraging us to listen to our spirit’s hunger, and reminding us to trust in the blessings of God’s presence in our most empty days.
We are grateful for the ongoing process of becoming who we are, for the season within, for the great adventure of life that challenges and comforts us at one and the same time.
We are grateful for the messengers of God – people, events, written or spoken words – that came to us at just the right time and helped us to grow.
We are grateful for God calling us to work with our gifts, grateful that we can be of service and use our talents in a responsible and just way.
We are grateful that we have the basic necessities of life, that we have the means and the ability to hear the cries of the poor and to respond with our abundance.
We are grateful for the miracle of life, for the green of our earth, for the amazing grace of our history; we are grateful that we still have time to decide the fate of the world by our choices and our actions, grateful that we have it within our power to bring a divided world to peace.
Amen
The Grateful Life
Nouwen
How can we live a truly grateful life? When we look back at all that has happened to us, we easily divide our lives into good things to be grateful for and bad things to forget. But with a past thus divided, we cannot move freely into the future. With many things to forget we can only limp toward the future.
True spiritual gratitude embraces all of our past, the good as well as the bad events, the joyful as well as the sorrowful moments. From the place where we stand, everything that took place brought us to this place, and we want to remember all of it as part of God’s guidance. That does not mean that all that happened in the past was good, but it does mean that even the bad didn’t happen outside the loving presence of God. . . . Once all of our past is remembered in gratitude, we are free to be sent into the world to proclaim good news to others.