My Thanksgiving Thoughts....

Being terribly honest, I have had a recent stuggle with some self pity the last few weeks, mostly driven by a sudden onset of a severe knee issue that has taken me completely out of any activity. Everything is a stuggle with out a knee, I've come to realize. I get my MRI Friday to determine the extent of the damage......
But anyway, I was wallowing in self pity the other night, and I saw one of those commercials about a boy who watched his parents get killed and is now raising his 4 younger siblings. I cried and cried and felt SO SELFISH and ridiculous.
Then I took my Boy Scout Pack to the Food Bank for a service project called Back Packs for Kids. This is a program where schools have identified kids that are going hungry over the weekends when they don't have access to the free meals at school. My personal job was to pull out the "donated" grocery bags that then get filled with the food for the weekend. These bags were often DISGUSTING....but it was all the donations they had to work with. Can I tell you how many of those plastic bags I have THROWN AWAY or recycled? I had NO IDEA.
I was reminded again of how sheltered my life is and how unfortunately, most of us are so unaware of what true suffering is. We would be so much slower to complain if we did.

So, my thought this Thanksgiving is to become more aware.

My father passed along a slide show that had a great message that was summarized by this,

"Live Simply, Love Generously, Care Deeply, Speak Kindly....and leave the rest to God".

Ten Things We Need to Understand
1. God wants spiritual fruit, no religious nuts.
2. There is no key to happiness. The door is always open.
3. Silence is often misinterpreted, but never misquoted.
4. Do the math....count your blessings.
5. Faith is the ability to not panic.
6. If you worry, you didn't pray. If you pray, don't worry.
7. As a child of God, prayer is like calling home every day.
8. The most important things in your house are the people.
9. When we get tangled up in our problems, be still. God wants us to be still so He can untangle the knot.
10. A grudge is a heavy thing to carry.

Happy Thanksgiving! May your families and lives be blessed!