...different, together.

God is here! As we Your people meet to offer praise and prayer,

May we find in fuller measure what it is in Christ we share.

Here, as in the world around us, all our varied skills and arts

Wait the coming of the Spirit into open minds and hearts.

---Fred Pratt Green, 1978

Here we are, God. We come to this place with an incredible array of talents, needs, resources, hurts, dreams, and personalities. It is quite amazing that we all keep coming here to make a church, isn’t it? What is it that keeps us coming back, that entices us to search for the things that bind us?

In the midst of our differences --- of need and resource, of faith and fear, of black and white and shades of gray --- we seek the coming of the Spirit of Christ. We await the Spirit, anticipate the Spirit --- to enliven us, to inform us, to enlarge us, to add meaning to our lives.

We pray, we praise, we seek, we anticipate…together

...go around the circle

For the harvests of the Spirit, thanks be to God.

For the good we all inherit, thanks be to God.

For the wonders that astound us, for the truths that still confound us,

most of all, that love has found us, thanks be to God.

---Fred Pratt Green, 1970

I know you’ve done it, and I know it has made you squirm, sigh, or roll your eyes (depending on your generation). Go around the circle --- the grownups’ table AND the kids’ table at your family Thanksgiving, the fellowship tables at church supper in November, the class seating arrangement in Sunday School --- and tell one thing you’re thankful for. Is there any exercise guaranteed to bring out the trite and repetitive in all of us? And yet, is there any chance most of us would stop to express gratitude for the richness of this life without going around the circle?

This hymn is a list of rich joys of the abundant life for which we can all be thankful; the list includes thanks for things I never thought of as rich until Fred Pratt Green brought them to my attention between the covers of our hymnal. No matter how world-wise and jaded we get, wonders still astound us, and (thank God) some truths still confound us. And best of all, love has found us.

There’s a place for us in the circle. Go around…thanks be to God.