Hello everyone, and welcome to Speaking with Joy, a podcast to fill your soul, challenge your mind,

and make you brave. I'm your host, Joy Clarkson, and an evangelist for all things good, true, and beautiful.

So make yourself a cup of tea, find somewhere comfortable, and let's dive in to this week's episode.

Though I tremble in the darkness in the cold and frozen snow, I am grateful for the winter, for the winter comes to show that our troubles never over and our work is never done, but with

the turning of the seasons, we will always see the sun. Well, hello everyone

and welcome back to Speaking with Joy. That is one of the verses from Noah Gunderson's lovely

song, Honest Songs, which has been a small album of his a long time ago that I've always loved.

And I tend to think of this song around November,

partially because I think it's written to evoke the sense of Thanksgiving, and it's about

sitting and feasting with family and the cold. And I always think of it now because we are

coming close to Thanksgiving, which is always a mixed feeling when you live

overseas because Thanksgiving is such a fundamentally American holiday. And I always find that

I celebrate it actually much more here than I would in the States because all the Americans are

kind of filled with a longing for home and so you end up going to five different versions

of Thanksgiving. But I also always begin to think of this song around now, especially in

Scotland, because it is about the gift that winter can give us. And I think about this often

in the month of November in Scotland, because it's when everything begins to get dark.

Scotland is so far north that by the time we hit the depths of winter, it really gets light around 10 a.m. and begins getting dark at 3.

So you really only have about five hours of intense daylight, which is so different from my experience of,

for instance, winter in Colorado. And we've already started to feel that change now. We had

daylight savings two weeks ago, and so it's lighter earlier, but there's already this kind of

very small window of when it's bright and

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