At this time of year, I need to express gratitude for the love of my life, my wife, and for my children who have given me reason to live.
There is a great working poem on prayer at the blog of my favorite saint, Ozarque.
At Must Love Books, there is a great metaphor.
I've been meaning to write about the negotiation class I taught recently. It reminded me of how grateful I am for many things.
I'm curious what others are grateful for.
4 comments:
I'm grateful for my ward:
Here is the real challenge of the consecration of a profession. It is so
easy to be moral in the abstract; so much harder in the dirty, raging,
hate-filled reality that is muttering and swearing a blue streak in your
office. Moses didn't get nice, clean, well-educated, upper-middle-class
Hebrews. He got illiterate, superstitious slaves. As he reminded them in
Deuteronomy, they were not the chosen people because they were more
pure, more upright than others. But from these people came the seeds of
the people of the covenant-they preserved the scriptures through war and
pestilence. Finally, they were the family of the Savior. By the same
token, Paul didn't get a nice, clean, well-behaved BYU ward in Corinth.
He thanked God he didn't baptize the Corinthians, because they are so
quarrelsome (1 Corinthians 1:14-15). He found the Corinthians carnal,
envying, and full of strife and division (1 Corinthians 3:3). They were
greedy, withholding support for missionary work and for the Church, but
providing for themselves (1 Corinthians 4:10-14). What did Paul find in
these quarrelsome and sinful Corinthians? He found them epistles from
God, written on the fleshy tables of his heart (2 Corinthians 3).
As professionals, you will minister to the needy, the weary, those who
are falling by the wayside. The whole do not come to the healer. If you
wish to share a common commitment for the good, as described by Shaffer
and Bellah, after Aristotle, you will have to look carefully. And it
will not be enough to say it is a miracle of God that good could come
from such people. They are the children of God, and you have consecrated
your time and talents to serve them, to bring them into goodness.
Constance K. Lundberg, "The Ethical Professional: Consecration in the
Workplace", Life in the Law, pp. 182-83:
I'm grateful for fudge:
http://www.exploratorium.edu/cooking/candy/recipe-fudge.html
Family obviously.
I'm grateful for my excellent psychologist! And his never-ending bottomless patience . . . . There is something so ACCEPTING about that.
A kind and supportive word and/or deed.
BEADS! They've saved my sanity since I discovered them. But not our overstretched finances, lol!
Good food, cause I'm sick of Ramen.
Nice people. Non-judgemental people. Few and far-between.
The fact that we strung our Christmas tree last year in a way so it'd fold up, with the lights on, so that we don't have to spend HOURS of back-breaking work untangling and stringing them.
Which brings me to a nifty tool that'll check, and even sometimes FIX a strand of lights, with a piezo pulse (it makes a connection come back by getting rid of a coating on a shunt or something.) So. We shouldn't have to destring the tree. Yay for easy tree set-up (okay, so I hate stringing Christmas trees, but I like the effect!)
Stephen, speaking of Must Love Books, Crystal's site seems to be down today. I hope it's only temporary...
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