A Step Toward Thankfulness

As you may know, I wear a pedometer.  Recently, the one I had wore out, and I had to get a new one.

I don’t like it as well.  You see, the old pedometer kept a running count of how many steps you took.  To find my daily total I plugged it into a computer but you could, if you chose, make a note of what the count was at the start of the day and then keep track of how many steps you were taking at the end of the day.  That was kind of neat.  I try to get at least seven thousand steps a day, if not more, so I could see if I was running behind and maybe needed to go for a walk or something.

The new one does not do that.  I still plug it into a computer to find my daily total, but it does not keep that running count of steps.  Instead, the readout sends me inspirational messages, such as “Hello, Healthy!” or “We make a great team”.  Right now it’s giving me a cartoon sun with a smiling face on it.  I’m not sure what it will do if I have a day where I have to be in the car or at the computer all day and can’t take many steps.  Maybe, “Get off the couch, Lardbutt!”

There’s nothing wrong with inspirational messages, of course.  I try to be encouraging and to inspire people, too.  The thing is that, to be effective, those messages need to be connected to something concrete.  If the readout keeps telling me how great I’m doing when I know I’m not doing all that great, any inspiration that might be derived from the message will be lost, because I’ll it doesn’t mean anything.

I think that has application to our relationship with God, too.  We’re told that we should give our praise and thanks to God, and we should.  But we should give our praise and thanks for specific things.  A general “Thank you, God” that’s not tied to anything really doesn’t have a whole lot of meaning.  We need to think of specific things that we’re actually thankful to God for.  And we need to express our thanks for those specific things to God.  That way, our thanks and our praise will have meaning, both to God and to ourselves.

It has application to our relationships with others, too.  There are all kinds of reasons that we could think of to praise others and be thankful to them, if we think about it.  We need to think about it.  And then we need to actually express that praise and that thanks.  And our praise and thanks needs to be for specific things that someone has done for us.  It can be nice to hear general praise, but knowing that someone noticed and appreciated a specific thing we did goes a lot farther.

So think of some specific thing you could thank someone for today.  And think of some specific thing you could thank God for, too.  Then, express that thanks.  It may make a lot of difference, both in your relationship to that person and in your relationship with God.