The Importance of Gratitude.

“If we meet someone who owes us thanks, we right away remember. But how often do we meet someone to whom we owe thanks without remembering anything about it?” -  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

My Most Significant Thanksgiving Holiday.

This is the most significant Thanksgiving Holiday for me. If someone, at the beginning of this year, had prophesied to me with a typical cliché or platitude like “This is Your Year of Impossibilities Becoming Possible”, I would have (by now) been seeing the person as some angel. This really is my year! And a testimony that a sinner like me can still see and obtain the grace of God in abundance.

The Only Prayer You'll Ever Need.

At the Stanford University's Memorial Church last Monday, Oprah Winfrey was reported to have educated the audience on what it meant to live a meaningful life.



Asking the more than 1,000 members of the audience to close their eyes, the media mogul encouraged them to breathe and feel the pulse of their personal energy.

"Open your heart and quietly to yourself say the only prayer that's ever needed: Thank you, thank you, thank you," she said. "You're still here. You get another chance this day to do better and be better, another chance to become more of who you were created and what you're created to fulfill. Thank you. Amen."

Oprah Winfrey was there to deliver an annual lecture in honor of the late Professor Harry Rathburn, a former faculty member at Stanford Law School. She went on to give students a glimpse of the earliest parts of her spiritual formation, back when she was a child attending Sunday school classes in rural Mississippi.

That’s it! I am in total agreement with Oprah. The only prayer we’ll ever need is a prayer of thanksgiving. All God needs from us is a heart of gratitude. Therefore, there is no point in delivering long speeches to God in the name of prayers. At the end of the day, those verbal epistles rarely contain one word of thanks but a long list of demands.

 

Taking Nothing For Granted: I remember 1991.

It was around this time in October, 1991 when I suffered from a dangerous case of food poisoning. That was a classic example of a gradual process of dying. Right before my eyes, my life was slipping away at a horrific pace. But I thank God for His grace, great luck and a good, prompt medical attention at the Eko Hospital, Lagos, Nigeria. I survived the ordeal. I was given so many injections and I.V. bottles that I thought there would be no more spaces on my butt and hands to punch holes with needles.

And I thought there was something extraordinary about my medical case---until I heard about some rich, powerful corporate C.E.O. in the room next to mine. He was suffering from renal failure, “a medical condition in which the kidneys fail to adequately filter waste products from the blood”. And just opposite my room was a woman, said to be the wife of a top shot in the government. She was suffering from colorectal cancer. This is “also known as colon cancer, rectal cancer or bowel cancer, a type of cancer that attacks the colon or rectum (parts of the large intestine)”.

When I heard of those more serious medical cases, I felt ashamed that I had made a big deal about my ordinary case of food poisoning. It didn’t matter to me anymore that by the time I was brought to the hospital, my heart, liver, kidneys and other vital organs were diagnosed to be at their lowest ebb. It was also no longer important that my doctor said, had I not got to the hospital at the time I did, there was a strong possibility of a massive heart attack. At that moment, what mattered to me was the sad news that the two hapless patients mentioned above did not survive their ailments!

Since then, I resolved to never take any good thing in my life for granted. So far, I have been richly blessed with all the good things of life. But even the mundane stuff pale insignificantly and grossly little when compared to my great physical and mental endowments. And there were great bonuses in the persons of a most wonderful wife and joyfully-enriching children for whom I will do anything to appreciate, protect and daily thank the almighty God.

The World is Beautiful.

We are in a world where evil thrives.

This sad fact however does not remove the existence of the other fact (this time, a positive kind) that we are in a beautiful world. It’s the only the sheer preponderance of evil that casts a huge shadow over the beauty of the world we live in. There is beauty everywhere--in individuals, animals, insects, plants, flowers, geographical landscape and in other things and places.

It’s therefore the responsibility of every lover of the school of positive thought to keep an open mind and eyes in a bid to see, behold and appreciate the hidden massive beauty that abounds in our world.

 

Praising the Lord.

Every day, a woman stood on her porch and shouted, “Praise the Lord!”

And every day, the atheist next door would yell, “there is no Lord!”

One day, the woman prayed, “Lord, I’m hungry. Please send me groceries.”

The next morning, she found a big bag of food on the stairs.

‘Praise the Lord…” she shouted in gratitude.

“Ah! I told you there was no Lord,” her neighbor said, jumping from behind a bush. “I bought those groceries…not some Lord.”

“Praise the Lord!” the woman shouted louder this time. “He not only sent me groceries, but he made the devil pay for them."

(Culled from the May, 2013 edition of Readers Digest).