Dear Friends in Christ,
November is not my favorite month on the calendar. It’s an “in-between” month. When I was a kid it was a less exciting time between Halloween and Christmas, costume-wearing and candy, Christmas and toys! Now it’s a barren time between colorful foliage and snow-covered branches. It’s a stark, barren time filled with shades of tan and gray when the skeletons of trees and bushes have been laid bare. It can be a little depressing to the eye.

But, spiritually, it’s a reminder that blessings, as the saying goes, can come “in disguise.” November is a leaner time of easily appreciated pleasures. It’s a time of waning sunlight and scarcer warmth when basking in these gives way to turning on indoor lights, turning up thermostats and sitting by a fire or a heater.

November is a faith-builder. For what’s a faith for if not for trusting, discovering, and “seeing” that good things sometimes come wrapped in under-appreciated, and even un-comfortable, clothing?

Emerging November exposures culminate in Thanksgiving dinner tables topped with an abundance of mouth-watering foods that are surrounded by friends and family, blessed traditions – and memories of Thanksgivings past.

Whenever I complained too much about “how little I had,” my mother would say to me, “Edward, count your blessings. Her’s was a reminder not so much to literally count things as it was a pointer to this spiritual truth: in any fleeting moment of experience and feeling, we likely already have more blessings than we know.

When not in any of your “most wonderful times of the year”, may “November blessings” appear to you,
Pastor Ed