As the end of the decade approaches, explorefaith is looking back with thanksgiving on all the ways your support has helped our ministry prosper and grow for the past ten years. To celebrate, this week we're proud to offer you a glimpse of those spiritual resources that comprise our readers' favorites year after year—material you return to time and again to nurture your faith and feed your soul and spirit.
With these reminders of what you love about explorefaith, we also extend this year's final, heartfelt appeal for you to ensure our ministry continues by making a tax-deductible gift in 2009. Your support is essential to our organization and the millions of people we serve, and we need it now more than ever!
As always, we offer these reflections with prayers for God's peace~
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Please support our efforts to make the good news of God's limitless love available to millions of seekers around the world by making a tax-deductible donation before December 31!
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"As we move toward a more profound understanding of gratitude, we must be willing to include the wholeness of Life—both the light and the dark and the holy potential in each.…Being thankful for our blessings does not mean we are entitled to them or deserve them."
Gracious God,
In the busyness of my day, I sometimes forget to stop to thank You for all that is good in my life. My blessings are many and my heart is filled with gratefulness for the gift of living, for the ability to love and be loved, for the opportunity to see the everyday wonders of creation, for sleep and water, for a mind that thinks and a body that feels.
I thank you, too, for those things in my life that are less than I would hope them to be. Things that seem challenging, unfair, or difficult. I rejoice that you are as near to me as my next breath and that in the midst of turbulence, I am growing and learning.
In the silence of my soul, I thank you most of all for your unconditional and eternal love. Amen.
"Master, now you are dismissing your servant in peace, according to your word; for my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples." -Luke 2:29-31
It's not always easy to have hope when our life is falling apart, when no one seems to care, when we've lost our job, when our child is sick, when the one we loved has gone. It's hard to keep faith that we will see God's salvation.
But, our faith is always rewarded. The time of waiting will pass. The salvation of God will be revealed and we will know we are ready to move on in peace.
Gracious God, let me trust in your promise no matter how long it takes for the promise to be fulfilled.
Like a double helix rendered elegant by complexity and splendid by authority, the amalgam of gospel and shared meal and the discipline of fixed-hour prayer were and have remained the chain of golden connection tying Christian to Christ and Christian to Christian across history, across geography, and across idiosyncrasies of faith.
