A beautiful day for giving thanks as I walk Penelope in a cool wind under a cloudless clear blue sky. The bird feeders are empty of songbirds. Maybe they are gathering in someone else’s yard for their Thanksgiving feast. I can hear the songbirds’ hymns of thanks from their perches on the old oak branches and power lines mingling in with the loud banging symphonies of the wind chimes. The wind is cold and strong making the bamboo canes twist and turn, their slender branches giving each other high fives.

I sat briefly in the swing this afternoon and immediately remembered a quote from William Shakespeare, perfect for this day. “Oh, Lord that lends me life, lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.” Read it in my mind as a prayer asking God to give me a thankful heart with gratitude for the blessing of life. Was thinking while I was sitting in the swing about how many things I, and I mean we, take for granted. Actually, we take our life for granted. When we lay our heads down at night we’re not promised tomorrow but we go to sleep assured we’ll have breath for tomorrow. We don’t question the sun will rise or the stars will be pinned in the sky at night.

We take for granted all the blessings that God has given us and forget to thank him in our prayers. Then something happens in our lives, a hardship that jerks us back to our forgotten faith, and we’re quickly on our knees in needful prayer to the Lord. We need to go to God in prayer each day. As I’ve written many times, just a simple, “thank you” or a heartfelt, “I need you,” is all God needs to hear. As Martha Hickman writes,“Faith is a gift. Open your hands and receive it.”

I was thankful to see the sunset tonight, subdued in golden honey watercolors. The sun, dressed in a dazzling silver sequined gown, white pearled gloves up to her elbows, wore a tiara of diamond rays on her head, beaming down across the golden painted horizon. As the sun slowly rolled down the evening’s horizon, she daintily took the hand of Father Sky, handsomely dressed in a formal black tuxedo, silver topped walking cane in one hand, top hat on his head. They were a handsome couple dragging the night’s darkness down the horizon. Father Sky kissed the sun goodnight and pinned the waxing crescent moon, handsome in his bright luminous light, in the velvet black of the night sky, surrounding him with bejeweled stars. Another day ends as night begins.

Psalms 8:3-4: reads, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you care for him?” I love the night sky with its moon and stars. Psalms 89 calls the moon “the faithful witness in the sky.”

We all need to be a faithful witness for Christ. “But in your hearts revere Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect,” 1 Peter 3:15. When we have the word of God in our hearts and we truly believe God has forgiven us of our sins and offers us eternal life, we are witnesses for God by our thoughts, words and actions.

“If the only prayer you ever said in your whole life was ‘thank you’ that would suffice.” — Meister Elkhart