Complaining or Gratitude?? It's a choice we have to make daily

Psalms 55:22 Cast your burden on the LORD, and he will sustain you; he will never permit the righteous to be moved.


We are blessed being in a country that has  so much available to us to keep us preoccupied. Disney world, Universal studios, Valley Fair, Ipods, Ipads, X-box 360, road trips, movie theaters, Red box movies are just  of the things that come to my mind that are available to us to keep us entertained.

As we get older we turn to more adult forms of entertainment like sporting events, dancing, hiking, sky diving. When hard things happen to us we turn to gambling, a drink after work to calm ourselves, affairs when we convince ourselves that our spouse isn't meeting our 'needs' to making excuses to remain away from home. 

We get so use to these forms of entertainment that when something terrible happens to us that we  gravitate toward entertainment options than face our fears head on.   We're  going along nicely with people we know that when something happens to them it shocks our system. When sudden death occurs we are unable to process the intensive emotions because we never learned that skill when we were younger. 

The greatest gift we can give our children is the ability for them to process the emotions from loss.  For the rest of their lives our kids will  know people they love die and unless they learn how to process their emotions associated with loss will tend to want to numb that pain with busyness or worst recreational drugs.

When our children were little we took them to the funeral of a new born  of their music teacher. It was hard, but we knew as parents our children needed to learn how to recognize the feelings of grief because whether we choose to admit it or not they will be attending funerals the rest of their lives. We didn't want to raise them like some parents who try to shelter their kids from the sadness associated with funerals so that when they are grown they learn to avoid attending them.   We did not them want them to  avoid the hard stuff of life in lieu of mind numbing entertainment because one day all of that unprocessed grief will return and cause more problems than if they had learned to process those emotions each time loss occurs.

The most amazing thing about grief is we have a God who in his word gives us the instructions on handling our grief.  He assures us that when someone dies in Christ heaven will be their new home and we can grieve as though there is hope that one day we would see them again.

I love Christian children's videos. 321 Penguins was one of our kids favorites when they were much younger.  In this video we find that Jason learns a valuable lesson about having gratitude for the things in life He learned this while traveling to the Planet of the Carnival of complaining.  I chose this clip for this blog because it illustrates the importance of  teaching our kids to gave gratitude for everything that happens in life.  If we can teach our kids the value of grieving for their losses then one of the ways they can show gratitude is attending funerals where they can support those who have suffered the loss.


 Which is why gratitude becomes a conscious choice we have to make on a daily basis.