HAPPY THANKS-LIVING I love the very specific felt-sense surrounding the holiday of Thanksgiving. For me it has little to do with eating or parades, and nothing to do multiple football games. There is energy around and permeating it that I have grown to deeply relish. It wasn’t always so. It used to be the precursor to the far more elaborate Christmas season. Symbolically, the Macy’s parade said it all: get through Thanksgiving and on to Santa! The Thanksgiving energy that is so precious to me now is the result of some very specific practices. I have shared many of these practices with the church that I now lead. I have for the past three years invited those interested into an experience I call the “Grat-I-Challenge.” There are

CONTEXTUAL APPRECIATION For the past three years here at the church I serve I have invited people to join me in what I call a month long Grat-I-Challenge. We begin on November 1st , and the invitation is to engage seven different practices, most daily, that will heighten the awareness and experience of gratitude. As I write this blog it is the eighth day of the month and I already feel a palpable and vital increased aliveness within me as a result of these practices. I have kept a daily gratitude journal for many years. I make it a consistent practice to look for the good in every challenge. These are two facets of the Grat-I-Challenge which certainly are not new to me. It does seem, however,