Scripture: 1 Timothy 4:4-5
For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
 
Thought for the Day: Our lives are filled with busyness. I honestly don’t think I know a single person whose day isn’t completely packed with too many activities. We are all stressed to the breaking point. I suspect the same was true for our ancestors. Actually, life might have been more stressful for them, since their survival was so intricately woven into the whims of weather patterns, or the ambitions of kings who thought themselves gods.
 
This letter to Timothy was probably written very late in the first century, possibly early in the second century. It was a time when leaders in the early church (such as Timothy) were being hounded on every side. Within the church, people had different, often opposing visions of what the church should look like. Outside the church, the Roman Empire saw Christians as rebels and worked hard to obliterate the movement. The author of this letter recognized that the only way to deal with that sort of stress is to constantly give thanks to God. Even the stuff that’s causing us the stress can’t be rejected, because in some fashion it is forming us as spiritual beings. There is a lesson to be learned in everything if we’re willing to step out of ourselves long enough to learn.
 
Prayers of thanks are an unfortunately overlooked form of stress relief. When we stop to give thanks for being alive—for the smell of the rain-soaked Florida wetlands, for the streaming beams of sunlight that look like shimmering roads to another universe, for the sheer, incredible, implausible fact that we have come to a deep consciousness in the holographic vastness of reality, we should be overcome with tearful joy. And in that moment of release, in that time of thanksgiving, we find peace and tranquility, knowing all things have been created good—including us.
 
Prayer: God who transcends time and space: Help me break through the busyness of my day. Still my mind, relieve my stress, and make me thankful for the glorious gift of life. Amen.