I rumbled around the nearly empty church for more than an hour after our Sunday worship services in late October. I kept finding small chores. I didn’t want to leave the building.

I was grateful for everything I had seen and heard and felt through the morning, and gratitude produces energy.

As I rumbled, I recalled a podcast I found recently while researching an assignment for an online laity course. The hosts, a pastor and a worship leader from Tennessee, were discussing Thanksgiving and gratitude. They suggested true gratitude resonates in two directions, inward joy and outward expression of joy.

“What does (gratitude) look like?” one of them asked. “Should we look different in a life of gratitude?

In another place, one of them asked a similar question: “Is there a way the world can see our joy and our gratitude for all the ways He has blessed us?”

I want these questions to be part of our prayer as we move toward Thanksgiving and Advent. Should we look different? Is there a way the world can see our joy?

On Nov. 5, as the sun sets at around 5:13 p.m., from wherever you are, with whoever wants to join you, let’s pray for more of God’s Light into the ways we can let the world see our joy and our hope and our gratitude.

We can begin by lifting prayers of thanksgiving for all the ways God has sustained and encouraged us throughout the year. We can be grateful for the ways Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have revealed themselves through family, friends, church, community, work, school, and nature. We can lift thanks for God’s abundance and accessibility and constancy.

But as we’re sharing our gratitude with God, let’s ask Him to show us how to use the energy that gratitude generates. Lord, lead us away from the empty room and into the spaces where your love and your light can change lives.

Lord, show us how to share our gratitude with a world that needs all that you so freely offer.

Photo by Irudayam