Are you thankful today? Of course you are. "If you've got three or more TV's in your house, you're richer than 95.4% of the world; if you've got two refrigerators, you're richer than... etc."
Are you humble today? (Be careful - as soon as you take any pride in it, you're not humble anymore!) I think these two are hard to separate. It's hard to be proud and thankful.
It seems to me there are three areas where we are most often thankful. There are probably more but to keep it simple let's say we're thankful for things, people and ideas.
We have a lot of great stuff that improves the quality of our daily lives, no question about it. And of course a lot of that is recent technology that makes us more fortunate than those before us. Beyond that, we know we should be thankful for our relationships. Pop stars are thankful for their fans, authors are thankful for people who buy their books, athletes are thankful for season ticket holders and bloggers are just happy for people's attention.
At another level, we are thankful for the bigger things -- the goodness in the world. Freedom, for example. The freedom to do what we should (and not necessarily what we want to) do is a true cause for thanks. Things like mercy and kindness, hope and forgiveness. To me, these are the things we need to be more thankful for. And only when we are humble enough to realize we don't deserve them can we be truly thankful for them. And that true thankfulness motivates us to give them to others.
In just a few lines I hope this is an encouragement to you. A friend of mine, Josh, expresses it better talking about his own genuine thankfulness in spite of circumstances in his iTunes download here.
