THE BLOG

Thanksgiving Day is on its way, grasping for air as it sits between an ever growing Halloween Day and the usual crunch of Christmas.  As a nation, we need a strong Thanksgiving Day.  We need it because to remind each of us of the powerful, positive impact that an attitude of gratitude plays in promoting and producing good emotional, mental, physical, relational, and spiritual health.  Author A. J. Jacobs makes that point in his book Thanks a Thousand.  His book resulted from him one day taking time to ponder what it would be like to personally thank every person responsible for his/her role in making possible the cup of coffee that he was drinking.  Upon further reflection Jacobs decided to do that very thing – to personally thank the barista, the coffee bean farmer, and everyone in between.  When his journey had taken him to the one-thousandth person, he stopped – hence the title of his book.  His book highlights studies about gratitude and thanksgiving which show that “gratitude is the single best predictor of well-being and good relationships.”

In his daily devotional book entitled Everyday Gospel, author Paul David Tripp writes the following, “The questions you ask and the answers you accept influence the content, character, and direction of your life. Insightful, wise people are not those who have the right answers. They are people who have the wisdom to ask the right questions. You can’t get the right answers if you spend your life asking the wrong questions.”