This Week in Nov 17 Worship

Dear Grace Family,

The idea for my current sermon series comes from a book by Anne Lamott called “Help Thanks Wow – The Three Essential Prayers.” She says that the first level of saying thank you in prayer is when you experience an unexpected grace in life like the Chiefs blocking a field goal in the last second. Or it may happen when you dodge a bullet like the Chiefs blocking a field goal in the last second. Anne says that these are good, but there are deeper levels of thanks. Listen to what she writes.

It is easy to thank God for life when things are going well. But life is much bigger than we give it credit for, and much of the time it’s harder than we would like. It’s a package deal, though. Sometime our mouths sag open with exhaustion, and our souls and minds do, too, with defeat, and that saggy opening is what we needed all along. Any opening leads to the chance of flow, which sometimes is the best we can hope for, and a minor miracle at that, open and fascinated, instead of tense and scared and shut down. God, thank you.

I think we can all admit that we don’t always feel thankful. Sometimes life knocks the wind out of us, and we just struggle to breathe, let alone say thank you, God. Yet, that may be the most important time in our life to find gratitude. Gratitude is a doorway to God’s grace which in turn is a doorway back to gratitude. Or as Anne Lamott writes, “The movement of grace toward gratitude brings us from the package of self-obsessed madness to a spiritual awakening. Gratitude is peace.”

This Sunday in worship we will take a deeper dive into the power of prayer and living lives of thanksgiving.

See you in worship!

Barry

Each Tuesday Pastor Mitch publishes a devotion on his website Weeklydevotion.com.  If you’d like to receive this in your inbox, drop him an email at   and just say “Sign me up!”