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Take time to be truly thankful

  • Published
  • By Chaplain (Maj.) John Painter
  • 315th Chaplain's Office
JOINT BASE CHARLESTON, S.C. --  Recently, I visited a website that purports to be able to rank individuals according to their annual income.

Did you know that if you make $50,000 per year, you're not quite a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet, but you are doing better than 99 percent of the 6.7 billion people in the world?

Now, let's say you make $200,000 per year.  At this salary, you would be the 786,570th richest person and in the top 0.01 percent of the world population.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture...you are ahead of hundreds of thousands of people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting without fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death...you are more blessed than many people in the world.  If one considers only Christianity, about 170,000 Christians suffer imprisonment, torture and death annually because of their beliefs.

I've also studied the World Health Organization and United Nations websites and learned that if you woke up this morning with more health than illness, especially if you have access to immunizations, you are more blessed than the million whom will not survive this week.  Two million people will die worldwide this year to Tuberculosis alone; 600,000 more to typhoid, both easily prevented with proper immunizations -- we should be thankful for shot lines.

If you have food in the refrigerator, you are richer than the 100,000 people who will die today either directly or indirectly related to famine.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than the 796 million adults in the world who cannot read at all, according to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) figures for 2010. 

So, as you gather with friends and family, take leave from jobs, worship freely and enjoy abundant food, take time this week to be truly thankful, remembering this simple but powerful advice from Eckhart von Hochheim, otherwise known as Meister Eckhart, a German theologian, philosopher and mystic:  "If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, 'thank you,' that would suffice."

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