Perspective Leads to Gratitude

This week, I was reminded of a blog post written by a good friend of mine while his family was serving as missionaries in Kenya some years ago. It was the year the “Occupy” movement protests, and my friend Jim was hearing the news, often through a variety of international viewpoints.

Perspective often leads to gratitude, does it not? This is not to say that we should always seek to be comforted by the fact that someone else is enduring a more acute form of suffering than we are. However, when we seek a bit of perspective, we find that what we take for granted is actually something we ought to be extremely thankful for. (For instance, I have thought on an embarrassing number of occasions in recent months that our television is “too small.”)

Here is the part that got me from Jim’s post; you can read it all here.

My parents visited last month and we celebrated an early Christmas with them - ham, cranberry sauce and all. After eating, I took some of the traditional meal to our yard-worker, Edward. He had a great time trying all the foods. He really liked cranberry sauce, enjoyed the ham. His favorite part was the stuffing; he didn't care for the olives. NONE of it was familiar to him. After he'd eaten it and had seconds of the stuffing and that precious cranberry sauce he asked, "You eat like this every Christmas?"

"Yep." I couldn't admit to him that I would have normally eaten twice the amount he'd just had OR that we'd had a meal like that only a month ago when we celebrated Thanksgiving or that we'd probably do it all over again when Easter came around.

"Wow!" Wonder filled his face. That he couldn't really fathom being wealthy enough to eat one meal like that was obvious - and Edward's a guy living on MORE than two dollars per day - better than over 50% of the world population!

I'm rich. I use the internet, own a car, buy health insurance, have running water (hot water, no less) and listen to an ipod. Maybe I'm not the one percent - but I eat until I'm full.

Today, I will choose to have perspective and be grateful.