Thanks God All the Time

Be cheerful no matter what; pray all the time; thank God no matter what happens. This is the way God wants you who belong to Christ Jesus to live. – 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18 (The Message)

Read the passage again, are you living that way? If not, why not? Have you tried thanking God no matter what happens? Why can we live this way if we live in Jesus?

This story was e-mailed to me:
A blind boy sat on the steps of a building with a hat by his feet. He held up a sign which said: "I am blind, please help." There were only a few coins in the hat. A man was walking by. He took a few coins from his pocket and dropped them into the hat. He then took the sign, turned it around, and wrote some words. He put the sign back so that everyone who walked by would see the new words. Soon the hat began to fill up. A lot more people were giving money to the blind boy.
That afternoon the man who had changed the sign came to see how things were. The boy recognized his footsteps and asked, "Were you the one who changed my sign this morning? What did you write?"
The man said, "I only wrote the truth. I said what you said but in a different way. I wrote: ‘Today is a beautiful day but I cannot see it.’" Both signs told people that the boy was blind. But the first sign simply said the boy was blind. The second sign told people that they were so lucky that they were not blind. Should we be surprised that the second sign was more effective?

A lot of life is how we look at it. Now don’t get me wrong, that is not all of life. But sometimes we get so down about what we do not have, we forget about what we do have. A friend told me about seeing a little boy watching his father complaining in a store about all what life had dealt him and his family. The poor boy started crying and his dad angrily said, “Why are you crying?” He hugged his father’s leg and said, “Daddy you have me.” We each have great reasons to give thanks and to rejoice, let’s hold onto them and thank our God that we have them at all!

With hope and joy,
Garrett