Season of Thanksgiving November 2017

Philippians 1:3  “I THANK my God upon every remembrance of you.” 

A teaching Nun, Helen Mrosla, tells of the day her kids were fighting in class. I appreciate youSo she made them each take a sheet of paper and list the names of ALL the other students. Then she told them to write something they LIKED about EACH one. She collected their papers, wrote the NAME of each student at the top of separate sheets of paper, listed ALL the nice things other students had written about them and gave these papers back to the students. As they read in amazement, each one said, “I never knew they felt that way.”

Helen moved away, but years later when she came home on vacation, her Dad said to her, “The Ecklands called last night to say their son Mark was killed in Vietnam and they would like you to come to his funeral.” After the service, Mark’s former classmates gathered at his family home, including Helen, their old teacher.

Mark’s dad suddenly said to her, “I’d like to show you something that I found in my son’s wallet.” Opening a billfold, he removed a familiar sheet of paper, now yellow and worn that listed all the good things each of his classmates had said about him.  Soon one by one, while smiling sheepishly, the others opened their purses and billfolds…and produced their copy too. Helen said, “All I could do was just sit there and cry…”

What would make a boy carry a fifteen-year-old paper everywhere he went…even to death in a rice-field halfway around the world?  The answer is “appreciation!”

There are people all around you today who are hungry and hurting for it.  Make sure you take time to give it to them…especially at this “season of thanksgiving”.

 1 Thessalonians 5:11    So encourage each other to build each other up, just as you are already doing.