John's Epistle

Saying Grace

Do you and I share a similar memory? In this particular image, I sit with my family around a table, in the kitchen or dining room, ready to eat a meal together, when one of my parents says, "Let's say grace."

For our family, "saying grace" meant reciting a prayer together, giving thanks to God and asking that God bless our meal and our time together with these words:

God is great

God is good

Let us thank him

For our food

By his hand

We all are fed

Thank you God

For daily bread.

It's a great and a graceful thing to thank God for the daily things we receive, and a wonderful thing to understand that everything we have is a gift from God. And, in many ways, these things are a lost art.

From the beginning of time, humans have had a yearning to prove they are the masters of their own worlds. We work under a myth that speaks quietly and consistently in our ears that we make our own way by our own virtue or fail by a lack of it, until the day that we begin to believe it is true.

As people of faith in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, the God who created all that is, we are bound to accept a different understanding. In this world view, all that we have and all that we are, including the talents, abilities, and opportunities that allow us to make a living and accumulate wealth, all of these belong to God. In a very real way, they are given to us so that we can show our love for God in how we use, care and cultivate them. Every one of these gifts is an opportunity for us to show the world that God exists and that God's grace is greater than any other power.

God's grace is at work in our world, whether we want to acknowledge it or not. Our best chance for happiness and contentment lies in understanding this and striving in all aspects of our lives to work with, rather than against, the flow of God's grace.

It is a process that starts with things as simple as stopping to enjoy the beauty of a sunset, listening to the laughter of a child, shutting our mouths so that others can share their own ideas without interruption, driving slower instead of faster, and, yes, saying grace. Acknowledging God in these simple things allows us to see God's grace at work in much more complex things.

So, once again, I wish you ...

Grace and peace,

Pastor John