Brandon: Choose gratitude this Thanksgiving

link Judy Brandon

Columnist

I want to challenge my readers to choose gratitude this Thanksgiving.

Could it be that self-centeredness causes us not to appreciate the blessings that God gives us each day, the blessings that each of us refuse to recognize? We all begin to think that life is hard when everything does not go our way.

I heard a story from a friend who was involved in that episode when the computers went down and she was stranded at the airport in Dallas. The stoppage was not in the airplanes but the computers that scheduled the airplanes.

As a result, thousands of passengers were stranded for hours in airports all across the United States.

News reports revealed overflowed airports, long lines and people sleeping on the floor with luggage as a pillows.

People were just downright frustrated. Their flights had been disrupted and with that came missed meetings, missed family times, interrupted vacations and extremely uncomfortable accommodations.

My friend was there for 11 hours and those 11 hours were heavy on her mind. The thought of opportunities missed and delayed schedules was frustrating to her. But she told me that during the time, she had an experience that really caused a paradigm shift in her attitude, a change in the way she viewed this delay in their life.

She had parked herself in the area where she thought her flight would eventually come in. The airport waiting area was crowded and people were grumpy because of missed flights. She in the meantime struck up a conversation with several people around her, finding out their plans and talking about the consequences of delays. She said that one in their group was a grandmother, one was a young man who was a college student, one was a retired Army officer and another was a young woman in a wheelchair.

The group talked about many things during that time but as the time progressed and people were beginning to get more and more weary, each took the opportunity to express their frustrations about the airline companies, the dependency upon technology and the general state of a computerized world.

Some declared they had been sitting there for hours and this was not the first time it had happened to them. Some said the airline should offer free tickets because of all the hardships they would all experience because of delays.

One said his business was going to suffer because he would not meet the scheduled meetings. Several complained of just being tired of sitting.

Finally the college student got up and said: “I am going to walk around … there is nothing to see and I’ll have to fight the crowds but I am tired of sitting.”

That is when the young woman in the wheelchair spoke up and said: “You are fortunate … I would give anything to get up and walk around.”

The group fell silent. My friend told me that she was stunned and then felt the comment go straight to her heart. How many times had she complained about the little things in life? How many times had she griped and fretted because she could not meet her important schedule? How many times had she bemoaned the fact that her life was so busy?

Then the verse “Be thankful in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you who belong to Christ Jesus,” (I Thessalonians 5:18) came to my friend’s mind.

This experience caused her to remember once again that being thankful is expressing appreciation for all our blessings in life, even the delays, because sometimes God’s greater purpose for us is fulfilled when there is a delay in our life.

Remembering that the basic needs of life and the gift of health are blessings from God. If our gratefulness in gone, then we become arrogant and self –centered thinking that we have achieved everything on our own.

Choose gratitude this Thanksgiving.

Judy Brandon writes about faith for the Clovis News Journal. Contact her at:

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