A Bouquet of Blessings for Patheos@5!

To be a blogger at all is a huge surprise in my life; it had never occurred to me! To be a blogger at Patheos is a thing of Beauty that is full of Grace and Truth. I am deeply grateful to have had this opportunity.

• Blessings for the vision that the entire team has:  for creating a space on-line where people of faith or no faith can speak and listen to one another .
• Blessings for the courage of the conviction that kind and honest conversation can lead to understanding, understanding can lead to change, and in the change walls can be broken down.
• Blessings for the willingness to go out on a limb by inviting people with differing points of view to weigh in on issues that are controversial, but critical.
  
• Blessings for the people I have “met” as a blogger on this site, people I would never encountered on my own–different age. different faith community, different formation, different lenses on the world…and blessings to those willing to be friends with me.
• Blessings for the hard work of helping people work together who don’t have an immediate affinity for each other; thanks for the gracious and tough standards of working things out between us.
  
• Blessing for receiving posts from some of the “the least of these, ” such as myself, who are not professional, not creating business for ourselves, and not on the Time Magazine List of 100 Most Influential People in the World.
• Blessings for continuing to push all of us as readers to know more, to wrestle more, to pray (if that is our practice) more with the pain and grief of the world all over; you continue to make it impossible to hide our heads in the sand. 
• Blessings for introducing to resources, especially books, that challenge, teach, and sometimes infuriate us; you have enhanced our learning and knowing.
  
• A particular shower of blessings on the staff who trouble shoot, smooth ruffled feathers, imagine possibilities, and believe in the sacred vision that they share together and with us.
  

May the next 5 years bring more conversation, more action, more compassion, more justice, more joy and ore faith! Blessings to all!