How to count your blessings
This is one of the nicest e-mails of its kind I have ever received. It starts off with the introduction: “I dreamt that I went to heaven and an angel was showing me around.” From there, the narrator continues:
We walked side-by-side inside a large workroom filled with angels. My angel guide stopped in front of the first section and said: “This is the Receiving Section. Here, all petitions to God said in prayer are received.”
I looked around in this area, and it was terribly busy with so many angels sorting out petitions written on voluminous paper sheets and scraps from people all over the world.
Then we moved on down a long corridor until we reached the second section. The angel then said to me: “This is the Packaging and Delivery Section. Here, the graces and blessings the people asked for are processed and delivered to the living persons who asked for them.”
I noticed again how busy it was there. There were many angels working hard at that station, since so many blessings had been requested and were being packaged for delivery to Earth.
Finally at the farthest end of the long corridor we stopped at the door of a very small station. To my great surprise, only one angel was seated there, idly doing nothing. “This is the Acknowledgment Section,” my angel friend quietly admitted to me. He seemed embarrassed.
“How is it that there is no work going on here?” I asked. “So sad,” the angel sighed. “After people receive the blessings that they asked for, very few send back acknowledgments.”
“How does one acknowledge God’s blessings?” I asked. “Simple,” the angel answered. “Just say: ‘Thank you, Lord’.”
“What blessings should they acknowledge?” I asked.
The angel replied: “If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep, then you are richer than 75% of people in this world. If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish, then you are among the top 8% of the world’s wealthiest.
“If you get this on your own computer, you are part of the 1% in the world who has that opportunity.
“If you woke up this morning with more health than illness, then you are more blessed than the many who will not even survive this day.
“If you have never experienced fear in battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation, then you are ahead of 700 million people in the world.
“If you can attend a church without the fear of harassment, arrest, torture or death you are envied by, and more blessed than, three billion people in the world.
“If your parents are still alive and still married, then you are very rare.
“If you can hold your head up and smile, you are not the norm, but unique to all those in doubt and despair.”
“Ok,” I said, “what now? How can I start?”
“Count your blessings, and if you care to, pass this along to remind everyone else how blessed we all are,” the angel said.
“And perhaps send the following message up to Heaven: ‘ATTN: Acknowledge Dept. Thank you Lord, for giving me the ability to share this message and for giving me so many wonderful people with whom to share it’.”
The e-mail then poses a challenge: “If you have read this far and are thankful for all that you have been blessed with, how can you not send it on?”
Quite right, how can one resist not passing this on? I just did, right here.
Now for something else to do with prayers. A bar is suing a church in Mt Vernon, Texas.
It all started when Drummond’s Bar decided to expand in order to increase their business. In response, the local Baptist church started a campaign to block the bar from expanding with petitions and prayers. Work progressed right up until the week before the grand reopening when lightning struck the bar and it burned to the ground.
The church folk were rather smug in their outlook, bragging about the power of prayer, until the bar owner sued the church on the grounds that it “was ultimately responsible for the demise of his building, either through direct or indirect actions or means”.
In its reply to the court, the church vehemently denied all responsibility or any connection to the fire.
The judge opened the proceedings by saying: “I don’t know how I’m going to decide this, but it appears that we have a bar owner who believes in the power of prayer, and a church congregation that does not.”
Makes you think doesn’t it?
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