Shout joyfully to the Lord!

Psalm 100
A psalm. For giving thanks.
1 Shout for joy to the LORD, all the earth.
2 Worship the LORD with gladness;
come before him with joyful songs.

3 Know that the LORD is God.
It is he who made us, and we are his;
we are his people, the sheep of his pasture.

4 Enter his gates with thanksgiving
and his courts with praise;
give thanks to him and praise his name.

5 For the LORD is good and his love endures forever;
his faithfulness continues through all generations.

A few years ago, on Thanksgiving Day, there was a column in our local newspaper by Joan Beck, a columnist for a Chicago newspaper. I always looked for her columns becasue they were so refreshing. She dealt with issues of the day, but not in the way of some of our columnists today. This particular column was titled, "For All Things Great and Small, we give Thanks on this Thanksgiving Day.

I'm going to put excerpts of it here. If you would like to read the whole text, e-mail me, and I'll send it to you. I love the way she uses alliteration in her essay.

Our fathers’ God to thee, author of liberty, we say thanks this day for homes and homecomings and homilies and Holmes, for holidays and holograms and hollyhocks, for taxol when it saves lives and tax reform when it’s real, for thesauruses and tyrannosauruses and all the wonders your hands have made....

For amber and ambulances, and amniocentesis and amicus curiae, we are truly grateful, O God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come. So, too, for daylight savings time until it ends, and a new year when it begins, for waffles and wiffleballs and warehouse clubs, for loons and lofts and lollipops for licorice and libraries and lilacs and liberty, for joggers, and jigsaws, and jonquils and jazz...

God, who is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble, we are grateful for comets and comedies and comic strips and the Pacific Rim community, for hope and soap and kaleidoscopes, for mother and foster mothers and grandmothers and motherlodes and mothers of invention. Our thanks, too, for answered prayers and amazing grace, for herbs and heroes and Hemingway and the Heimlich maneuver...

For diapers and diamonds and dialysis, we give thanks, o God the omnipotent, for unicorns and universities and UNICEF, for cells and celery and cellular phones, for trips and ships and scholarships, for friends in need and angels nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth nor any other creature shall be able to separate us from the love of God

Joan Beck, columnist for the Chicago Tribune.