(Editor’s note: Each year our Illinois Baptist team offers a Thanksgiving prayer in the way of Chicago Tribune columnist Joan Beck who annually published her list in free verse, interspersing lines from hymns and ending in Paul’s crescendo from Romans 8.)
As we gather together to count
the Lord’s blessings…405 years
after the first Thanksgiving Day,
we stand with pilgrims and
founders and natives and immigrants,
grateful for a free land
and a nation that still allows us
to pursue life, liberty, and happiness.
We hold with gratitude our basic freedoms
of speech, press, religion, and assembly
as first and foremost in the
unique practices of Americans
and examples for the world.
We march toward our nation’s
SemiQuinCentennial: the
American Experiment nears
half of five-hundred years—
only and always by Your grace.
As Christians, we proclaim,
Jesus shall reign
where’er the sun
doth his successive
journeys run.
We are grateful that in this and
every season,
the name of Christ is lifted up,
That our annual convention
concluded peaceably,
That sending missionaries
remained uppermost,
That the twin pillars of
doctrine and missions,
believing and doing,
keep us advancing
the gospel together.
This has been a year with some
joy and much pain.
We need Your healing presence:
In Ukraine and Russia,
In Israel and Gaza,
In Sudan and Myanmar,
In Southside and Chatham.
In rows of crosses where
children died,
In national mourning and
turning point moments.
With hearts full to breaking,
your people have said,
Whatever may come,
and whatever lies before me,
let me be singing when
the evening comes.
We count our blessings one by
one, Amazing things that God
has done,
A-I diagnoses, omninomics,
Signs of life on Martian rocks,
Gen Alpha and
the hope of youth,
Squishmallows,
And Labubu.
Lord of all to Thee we raise this
our hymn of grateful praise…
“that neither death nor life,
nor angels nor rulers, nor
things present nor things
to come, nor powers, nor
height, nor depth, nor anything
else in all creation,
will be able to separate
us from the love of God in
Christ Jesus our Lord.”
Amen.