A Prayer of Thanksgiving.

From all of us at Spoken to all of you, Happy Thanksgiving! This day, not unlike engagement and marriage, reflects life's tensions: feast and fast, anticipation and its fulfillment, hunger and contentment--restlessness ends not in marriage, but in eternity. Know of our prayers for you in this sacred time and in this start of the holiday season!

Lord, we come before you in thanks. We are gifted and entrusted with freedom, with truth, with your bounty. You, who have poured yourself over us, bled and given everything all for love of us--to win us back and bring us home--we praise you.

We trust in your generosity, whatever that looks like in this moment. We ask only to receive. Fill us, Lord. All that is of you is gift, even when it doesn’t look anything like we might have imagined. Strengthen us in trust; let us receive you fully, that we may experience every act of the Father’s will as a mercy.

You are a God of abundance. And yet, we hunger. Let us embrace these aches through waiting, through restlessness, through uncertainty. You are permanence, Lord. Rest. Certainty. May we see this longing as it is, unveiled: our desire for communion, for eternity with you. May all our wanderings draw us deeper into your love.

In this season of home, of family, of breaking bread, let us live with our first home in mind, our identity as your children. Humbly we beg for the grace to sanctify each other, to return each other to you, Father. Sustain us in your body and your precious blood, that we may live with joyful anticipation of your heavenly banquet, the feast of your love.

The voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the voices of those who sing, as they bring thank offerings to the house of the Lord:

‘Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the Lord is good, for his steadfast love endures for ever!’

For I will restore the fortunes of the land as at first, says the Lord.

- Jeremiah 33:11