The Women's Thank Offering gives us a head start on our own thanksgiving spiritual exercises. It started as a small gesture that has now lasted well over a century to live out the words of Mt. 25 to make this world more livable, more human.

First, most of us think in terms of losses or liabilities when we look at life. We work with half of a balance sheet. We look at the minus end, but don;t tote up the credit side of the ledger nearly enough. An alternative way is to pay attention to our assets. It is good to list them out. What are your personal assets? What virtues do you have, what physical, emotional, spiritual assets are at your disposal? Emerson said that what lies behind and what lies ahead cannot compare to what lies within us." If we pay more attention to what encourages and heartens us, we tend to make better decisions. When we let go of our alarms and instead replace them with triggers for releasing for engaging our assets, we tamp down feelings of anger and anxiety that inhibit us from working well, alone or together. (Cramer, Changing the Way You See Yourself). G.K. Chesterton said that "all tings look better when they look like gifts."

We do well to give thanks for virtues that come to us as gifts more than through hard won practice. We do not do everything on our own, but we are caught up in a world on which we depend. When Barbara and I did an asset exercise in Columbus some time ago, the idea for the talent sharing came through that exercise, a joyous expression of gratitude for gifts we have to share and gifts we would like to share.

Robert Emmons is making a career in examining gratitude as a virtue in our day to day lives. He writes that " ingratitude leads ...to a confining, restrictive, shrinking sense of self" (2007:10). The practice of gratitude, such as keeping a gratitude journal, is correlated with all sorts of good and healthy attitudes and habits. He writes of embodied gratitude of expressing it in ways beyond words. surely the thank Offering is such a gesture. Private gifts are rendered public actions; personal priorities become public property. It does not have to be a large-scale effort. Asset thinking emphasizes things that are doable with the resources available to us. As I am getting older, my concern for the environment grows, so I am planting trees in the names of our daughters in places that need them. with the increasing amount of CO(2) we are pouring into the air, that would be everywhere. I have a friend who gets tree seedlings from the nearby state park and distributes them for free. It embodies our gratitude for water by providing for clean, safe water in villages in Africa. For creative people who can make quilts and clothes, it provides sewing machines for people to clothe families but even start small businesses. For those of us with dentists, it provides dental care to children. for those who farm, we provide a tractor to Ghana. For those who go to CVS we provide money for medicines. For those of us with markets, we are providing a mill to grind corn.

  

One intriguing gratitude study was an assignment to write a nice letter of about 300 words that details how important someone has been in your life. Make an appointment to see them if you think you could read it to them or send it if you think you cant'/ I would take that experiment and put it in the explicitly spiritual realm of writing a nice letter to god of 300 words or so of gratitude. Consider a prayer list of thanksgiving for the upcoming week? Know that the contributions to the thank Offering is an enactd prayer, one that tells god of our best hopes for each other.