O God, we thank you for life, and for all it holds of happiness and work and play and risk and courage and beauty.

We thank you for all the adventures of the mind, whereby we pursue what is true, grapple with difficult problems, and share a little in the vast heritage of human knowledge.

We thank you for the firmness of reasonable people in refusing to follow extremists; but we also thank you for the pioneers of advancing thought in science, art and religion.

We thank you for all heroic souls who shame our cowardice; for all sympathetic souls who communicate encouragement; for all saintly souls, seldom wearing haloes, who kindle our desire to be really good.

We thank you for friendship and the faces of those who look kindly upon us, even when we fail, and who greatly help to bring us 8ack to our bravest selves again.

We thank you for the exchange of gifts, for letters to and from those we love, for the sparkle of a pleasant wit, for the refreshment of unforced laughter, and for the song remembered for the singer’s sake.

We thank you for the freedom which growing older gives us from the troubles of being very young, so that we have more big things to care about and fewer little things to cry about.

Above all, we thank you for your call to be ourselves at our best, without miserably trying to be somebody else. So may we grow in the strength to make the best of things, trusting you that they will make the best of us.