“Be joyful always; pray continually; give thanks in all circumstances, for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:16-18)

If you do a word search of the Bible, you will find that prayer and thanksgiving go together an awful lot.  In fact, it’s almost unusual not to find them together; I wonder why that is…

I don’t claim to be all that smart, but I do have a theory about this.

If  you received an invitation to sit down with the president for a chat, wouldn’t it occur to you to thank him for the invitation?  Hey, I don’t care if you like him or not, he’s a busy guy with lots of people wanting some time, and he showed you the honor of inviting you.  Wouldn’t you thank him for his time?

As busy as the president must be, how much more important and busy must God be!  After all, he is running the whole universe, not just one little country on one little planet…

So, a person’s first impulse might be to give thanks for His attention.  But once you do that, it should occur to you that He has done a lot more than just grant an audience; He has given you life, a home, a nice family, and so on.

Then all of a sudden, a whole lot of other things come to mind to give thanks for; maybe you start to realize that you are a really fortunate person, who is blessed all of the time, even though you may not have every little thing you ever wished for.  In fact, you might even start to think that some of the things that bug you are really not very important!

I’d like to go on, but if you’ll excuse me, I just thought of some things I’d like to talk to God about…