Thursday, November 18, 2021https://kuc.org/wp-content/uploads/joy-48.jpg

Katie Snipes Lancaster

Scripture
No one has greater love than this,
to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
John 15:13

A Look at Joy
We will find that praise and gratitude are central to our efforts to speak the truth. As Walter Brueggemann has written, “Praise is the duty and delight, the ultimate vocation of the human community.” C. S. Lewis observed that grateful people are emotionally healthy people. “Praise,” he said, “almost seems to be inner health made audible.” And John Updike believed that when we cultivate and practice the habit of gratitude, the experience of gratitude deepens over the years:

“Aging calls us outdoors . . . into the lowly simplicities that we thought we had outgrown as children. We come again to love the plain world, stones and wood, air and water. The act of seeing itself is glorious, and of hearing, and feeling, and tasting.”

No wonder we greet the season of Thanksgiving with “Now thank we all our God / With heart and hand and voices.”

Prayer
Make our gratitude audible, O God,
deepening in this season of loving the world anew.
Amen.