I am most thankful for what I don’t have, for had my life’s wish list been filled in the manner I had chosen I would be steeped in meaningless trinkets verses bathed in God’s treasures.

I am thankful that there are those among us who have sacrificed dearly on behalf of us. And I ardently pray to God that I might be less like myself and more like them.

It was when the sun gently slipped off the backside of the horizon and slowly drew the light of the day in it’s train that everything went quiet. And before the assorted choruses of crickets and spring peepers rose to greet the night, nature nodded at a day well done. And regardless of whether my day had come with rain or sunshine, I find few things as healing as lifting my soul above my circumstances and bringing the day to a close by nodding at a day well done.

It is my hope that despite the gravity of the trials, we will never forget that the privilege to live life always offsets the difficulties involved in the living of it. This is the essence of thanksgiving.

To be thankful for one thing is infinitely more powerful than to be bitter about a hundred others.

There is an invincible fortress that greed, gluttony and all of the other self-centered forces relentlessly assail with great force. Yet this unassailable fortress is such that the torrent may advance against it in a manner both vile and formidable, but the mad rage of this crazed maelstrom born of greed will helplessly fall to an exhausted calm before it ever touches its walls. And it is the simple attitude of thankfulness that builds a massive fortress such as this.

As subtle as it appears, being thankful is in fact an utterly invincible attitude that has enough muscle to handily uproot the most negative attitudes that we can conjure up. And I would think that we would be thankful that we can actually have that much power working against all our negativity.

By far, the most precious gifts are those that I have, for without those I will never be able to obtain those that I don’t.

Achievement without the privilege to achieve means that we can be thankful for the former when it happens, but we need to be thankful that the latter allowed it to happen.