Thankfulness

At the end of the last chapter of To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth Jeff Cooper offers the reader a list of the blessings he’s received (good health, loving wife, fine children, etc). He ends with “…such blessings cannot be deserved, but they are deeply and humbly appreciated.”

At this time of year we celebrate a uniquely American holiday, Thanksgiving. We celebrate not the founding of our nation, our founders, or our great men and women. We take this time to give thanks for the blessings we have received. Despite the efforts of some to make this into a time of mourning for what was done to the American Indians (and I suspect their descendents are grateful that they’re no longer living like their ancestors), it is a time for counting blessings.

I’m grateful first of all that I serve a God who loves me, who loves all of His creatures. I’m grateful that God doesn’t require that I defend Him but that He comes to my aid to protect me, even from myself.

I’m grateful that I live in the most free, most prosperous nation in the world. A nation that offers me the chance, and only the chance, to succeed. A nation where my abilities are the only possible deterrent to my own success.

I’m grateful for a wife who, inexplicably, loves me. A woman I’d die for and who I live for. A woman who understands me better than I understand myself and who strives to make me happy (and succeeds resoundingly).

I’m thankful that I had parents who taught me right from wrong, who didn’t explain away my misdeeds but neither did they dwell on them after the lesson was learned.

I’m grateful that I married into a wonderful family that treats me as one of their own. After my wife and I married it was just so natural to call my new mother-in-law “Mom”, a name I didn’t think I’d ever utter again after my mother died in 1990.

I’m grateful for good health, a comfortable home, and a good job. I’m glad that I can take my job seriously enough to be good at it but not be so obsessed with it that I live to work rather than work to live.

No, I do not deserve these blessings, but I appreciate them.