Tag Archives: thankfulness

Life Lessons

How to Get Peace!

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If only we could have instant peace in times of trouble! Instead, our stomach muscles tighten, and our blood pressure goes up. We get a panicky feeling and our mind reels as we wonder what to do.

    When the initial shock has worn off, then our mind starts to go around in circles. Peace seems further away than ever. But there is one way to settle one’s mind, and that is to concentrate on the blessings we still have. It could always have been worse, and we are not the only ones to suffer. If we count our blessings and concentrate on  what we have rather than on what we don’t have makes all the difference. To be able to thank God that things are no worse lifts our spirits out of ourselves and we reach a higher plane than just feeling sorry for ourselves!

   One lady in our group said the other day that she is making it a habit to always think of ten blessings that are waiting for her each  new day. The first one she said was to thank God for the blessing of being able to hear. To wake up each morning and be able to hear the birds chirping was one of the first blessings she thought of every morning.

    This really challenged me as I thought of how we had been complaining about the interminable cooing of the doves around our house. We thought it was such a monotonous sound, always the same tones with no variation at all. But what if we couldn’t hear them at all? That WOULD be a matter of concern! So I started to listen with a fresh vision of thankfulness rather than one of complaining.

   There are so many other things that we can be thankful for too….so let’s cultivate the habit of thankfulness, rather than one of complaints!!

Life Lessons

That Black Dot!

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A friend sent me one of those thought provoking excerpts that you see from time to time, and I thought this one was worth passing on. A professor set his class an exercise to teach them an object lesson, and as they sat at their desks there was a blank piece of paper in front of each of them. “Now when I tell you to turn that paper over,” he said, “I want you to spend ten minutes, describing what you see on it”.

The class settled themselves down, and then he said, “Now turn your paper over and write what you see.”

They each turned their paper over and it was completely blank except for one black spot in the middle of the sheet. There was silence for a moment, and then they began to write. After he had collected the papers at the end of the ten minutes, he began to read what they had written. Without exception, they had all concentrated on the black dot, describing its approximate size and position on the paper, and what they thought it might mean.

“Now,” he said, “I did this to illustrate a point that I want you to all remember. You all concentrated on the black dot, and you’ve all written about it. But not one of you even seem to have noticed the amount of clean white paper there is surrounding that black spot! You know, that’s like the bad things that happen in our lives, and we all have them from time to time. They are just like that small black dot, and they seem to consume our thinking. But I want you to concentrate rather on the amount of clean white paper there is on that page. This is like the good things that we can enjoy, even while there is a black dot on our page! There are always things we can be thankful for, and as we concentrate on them, the amount of clean white paper makes the black dot look very small…the good things almost over-ride the black dot.”

There is a lot of truth in this small parable…we should always concentrate on our blessings rather than on the dots of disappointments and discouragements. They will pass with time while the joy of the blessings will last. No matter how bad our circumstances, there is always something that we can be thankful for, especially when we have a Christian faith and hope in God. That is the first thing we can praise God for!