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There was once a young boy who went to spend the week with his grandfather on the farm. While walking around he noticed the chickens, they were scratching and playing around. The little lad said, “They ain’t got it”. Next he saw a colt in the field playing and kicking up its heel’s to which he replied, “He ain’t got it”. After examining all of the animals on his grandfather’s farm and see that none of them had “it”, this boy finally found the old donkey in the barn. When he saw the donkey’s long, frowning face and the way that the donkey just stood there he screamed for his grandfather to come quick. “I found it, I found it” the boy kept yelling. When his grandfather asked what he had found he said, “Pawpaw, I found an animal that has the same kind of religion that you have.”
A man has been lost and walking in the desert for about five days. One hot day--actually, they’re all hot--he comes to the home of a preacher. Tired and weak, he crawls up to the house and collapses on the doorstep. The preacher takes him in and nurses him back to health. Feeling better, the man asks the preacher for directions to the nearest town. The preacher tells him the directions, and offers to lend him his horse to make it. The preacher says, "However, there is a special thing about this horse. You have to say ’Thank God’ to make it go and ’Amen’ to make it stop."
Anxious to get to town, the man says, "Sure, okay" and gets on the horse. He says, "Thank God" and sho ’nuff, the horse starts walking. A bit later he says louder, "Thank God, thank God," and the horse starts trotting. Feeling really brave, the man say, "Thank God! Thank God! THANK GOD!" and the horse is soon up to a full run!
About then he realizes he’s heading for a huge cliff and yells "Whoa!" But the horse doesn’t even slow! It’s coming up REAL QUICK and he’s doing everything he can to make the horse stop. "Whoa, stop, hold on!" Finally he remembers "AMEN!!!"
The horse stops a mere two inches from the cliff’s edge, almost throwing him over its head. The man, panting and heart racing, wipes the sweat from his face and leans back in the saddle. "Oh!" he says, gasping for air, "Thank God."
O Lord, that lends me life,
Lend me a heart replete with thankfulness.
William Shakespeare
EVERYTHING I NEED
“I have everything I need for joy!” Robert Reed said.
His hands are twisted and his feet are useless. He can’t bathe himself. He can’t feed himself. He can’t brush his teeth, comb his hair, or put on his underwear. Strips of Velcro hold his shirts together. His speech drags like a worn out audiocassette.
Robert has cerebral palsy.
The disease keeps him from driving a car, riding a bike, and going for a walk. But it didn’t keep him from graduating from high school or attending Abilene Christian University, from which he graduate with a degree in Latin. Having cerebral palsy didn’t keep him from teaching at St. Louis Junior College or from venturing overseas on five mission trips.
And Robert’s disease didn’t prevent him from becoming a missionary in Portugal.
He moved to Lisbon, alone, in 1972. There he rented a hotel room and began studying Portuguese. He found a restaurant owner who would feed him after the rush hour and a tutor who would instruct him in the language.
Then he stationed himself daily in a park, where he distributed brochures about Christ. Within six years he led seventy people to the Lord, one of whom became his wife, Rosa.
I heard Robert speak recently. I watched other men carry him in his wheelchair onto the platform. I watched them lay a Bible in his lap. I watched h...
“There is more joy in Jesus in 24 hours than there is in the world in
365
days. I have tried them both.”
R. A. Torrey
My natural mother once wrote a poem about being thankful that I have always treasured since I discovered it. She died in 1984 with skin cancer. But, all that I learned from her is still with me today. I thank God for every memory and every valuable lesson that she taught me about life.
Her Poem went like this…
Thank God for dirty dishes,
They have a tale to tell.
While other folks go hungry,
We’re eating very well.
With home and health and happiness
We should not want to fuss.
For by this stack of evidence,
God is very good to us.
(Cecelia D. Williams)
It is often that stack of evidence that we so often forget or slight because we are too busy fussing or complaining.
It is said that as Benjamin Franklin concluded a stirring speech on the guarantees of the Constitution, a heckler shouted, "Aw, them words don’t mean nothin’ at all. Where’s all the happiness you say it guarantees us?" Franklin smiled and replied, "My friend, the Constitution only guarantees the American people the right to pursue happiness; you have to catch it yourself."
THE POWER OF GIVING THANKS
Something to reflect on as you sit down to your Thanksgiving dinner:
If you had been a Pilgrim, would you have given thanks?
Consider what they had been through, the men and women who broke bread together on that first Thanksgiving in 1621.
They had uprooted themselves and sailed for America, an endeavor so hazardous that published guides advised travelers to the New World, "First, make thy will." The crossing was very rough and the Mayflower was blown off course. Instead of reaching Virginia, where Englishmen had settled 13 years earlier, the Pilgrims ended up in the wilds of Massachusetts. By the time they found a place to make their new home - Plymouth, they called it - winter had set in.
The storms were frightful. Shelter was rudimentary. There was little food. Within weeks, nearly all the settlers were sick.
"That which was most sad and lamentable," Governor William Bradford later recalled, "was that in two or three months’ time, half of their company died, especially in January and February, being the depth of winter, and wanting houses and other comforts; being infected with the scurvy and other diseases.... There died sometimes two or three of a day."
When spring came, Indians showed them how to plant corn, but their first crops were dismal. Supplies ran out, but their sponsors in London refused t...
THANKS FOR THE HELMET
Cecil Conrad was a farm boy, tired of waking up at the crack of dawn to clean up after cows. He lied about his age, joined the Army and helped free Asia from the Axis.
But it was in the next war, battling Communists in Korea, that Conrad might truly have regretted his change of career.
In a too-shallow foxhole, somewhere north of Seoul, the 188th Airborne Division soldier held his gun close to his head, trying to shield himself from fast-flying ordnance that "whistled through the air like birds tweeting," he said.
Then the world exploded in his face.
"It was like being smacked with a baseball bat. It knocked me backwards," Conrad said.
Dirt had hit him, a chunk of sod flung up by a shell, Conrad thought, as he gradually accepted the fact that he was still alive.
Then he touched his helmet, and felt the hole that a shell had torn out of the steel.
"I knew a piece of sod couldn’t do that," he said.
By the laws of nature, that big bullet ought to have kept on going, making a fatal journey through his skull and brain. Instead, it struck the steel at such an angle that it cut through the metal and then arced away. He had a bruise and a headache, but he would live to tell the story.
Conrad still has that old helmet, with its tell-tale furrow in the brow.
A Korean vet thankful for the helmet that saved his life
SOURCE: "Korean Vet Thankful For The Helmet That Saved His Life" by Cliff Davis. 11/10/2002. ©The Progress-Index 2002. http://www.zwire.com/site/news.cfm?BRD=2271&dept_id=462946&newsid=6014233&PAG=461&rfi=9
“A prominent businessman at a luncheon announcing his decision to give away a significant amount of money to his alma mater caused great division within his family, for his money was coming out of what his children believed to be their rightful inheritance. The man, once one to find great joy in drinking , had had a life-changing and life-saving experience through his faith. One of his children asked him why he was giving so much money. When he replied that it brought him great joy, the child pointedly asked why he didn’t go back to drinking. The peace of a new life in Christ was the lack of peace in one who didn’t understand or accept”. (Charles Bugg. ed. The Abingdon Preaching Annual 2201 Edition. Eradio Valverde. “Did Jesus Suffer From Stress?”. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000, p. 305).
