God, I’m sitting with the fact that all holidays are complicated. Thanksgiving is the worst–because let’s be honest, the next one is always the worst one.
We try to remember to give thanks in a country where taking, enslaving and abusing people, land and…well everything is a part of our DNA.
And then there are the complications of not seeing family this year. And perhaps for some people, it’s emotionally safer to not see their family. Queer people who are rejected, disabled people who are forced to pass, victims of abuse or neglect trying to build bridges in a broken system.
So I’m praying for this complicated holiday, where everyone gets to feel especially lonely this year.
Teach us thanksgiving,
The Thanks part, and the giving part too.
Help us to find ways to safely connect and support one another. Help us to find the moments of security in this turbulent times.
But also, let us give ourselves permission for these holidays to be complicated.
Let us take them as they are, and struggle to acknowledge who and where we are this year.
This I pray in the name of the Holy Comforter, the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Feel free to use/adapt with credit to Pastor Katy Stenta
Read about my journey towards a doctorate in ministry in creative writing and give a small donation towards my tuition! About Me: My Story & My Writing
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Author: katyandtheword
Pastor Katy has enjoyed ministry at New Covenant since 2010, where the church has solidified its community focus. Prior to that she studied both Theology and Christian Formation at Princeton Theological Seminary. She also served as an Assistant Chaplain at Trenton Psychiatric Hospital and as the Christian Educational Coordinator at Bethany Presbyterian at Bloomfield, NJ.
She is an writer and is published in Enfleshed, Sermonsuite, Presbyterian's today and Outlook. She writes prayers, liturgy, poems and public theology and is pursuing her doctorate in ministry in Creative Write and Pittsburgh Theological Seminary.
She enjoys working within and connecting to the community, is known to laugh a lot during service, and tells as many stories as possible. Pastor Katy loves reading Science Fiction and Fantasy, theater, arts and crafts, music, playing with children and sunshine, and continues to try to be as (w)holistically Christian as possible.
"Publisher after publisher turned down A Wrinkle in Time," L'Engle wrote, "because it deals overtly with the problem of evil, and it was too difficult for children, and was it a children's or an adult's book, anyhow?" The next year it won the prestigious John Newbery Medal.
Tolkien states in the foreword to The Lord of the Rings that he disliked allegories and that the story was not one.[66] Instead he preferred what he termed "applicability", the freedom of the reader to interpret the work in the light of his or her own life and times.
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