Being grateful for God’s gifts is the key to a happy, successful life

A reader sent me the following story on gratitude.

“I dreamed I went to heaven and an angel was showing me around. We walked together in a large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said, ‘This is the Receiving Section. Here, we receive all prayer petitions to God.’

“I looked around and noticed how terribly busy the many angels were sorting out the petitions from people all over the world. Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section.

“The angel then said to me, ‘This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them.’ I noticed again how busy it was there. Many angels were working hard at that station packaging the requests of so many people on earth.

“Finally, at the farthest end of the long corridor, we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, doing practically nothing. ‘This is the Acknowledgment Section,’ my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed.

“‘How is it that there is no work going on here?’ I asked.

“‘After people receive their blessings, very few send acknowledgments,’ sighed the angel.

“‘How does one acknowledge God’s blessings?’ I asked.

“‘Simple,’ the angel answered. ‘Just say, “Thank you, Lord.”‘

“‘What blessings should people acknowledge?’ I asked.

“‘If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, you are richer than 75 percent of this world. If you have money in the bank and in your wallet, you are among the top 8 percent of the world’s wealthy. If you have your own computer, you are part of the 1 percent in the world who has that opportunity.’

“‘If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day. If you have never experienced the fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture or the pangs of starvation, you are ahead of 700 million people in the world.’

“‘If you can attend a church without the fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death, you are more blessed than 3 billion people in the world. If your parents are still alive and still married, you are very rare. If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm. You’re unique to all those in doubt and despair.'”

If you can read this column, you are more blessed than more than 2 billion people in the world who cannot read at all. During this Thanksgiving time we want to count our blessings and give thanks to God for all those blessing we take for grant. How blessed we all are!

Henry Ward Beecher tells us, “Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.”

Melody Beattie has a similar thought, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.”

And medieval spiritual writer Meister Eckhart said, “If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.”

Happy Thanksgiving!