Table of contents for November 2015 in Guideposts

Thanksgiving Recipes Need some kitchen inspiration this holiday season? Check out our tasty Thanksgiving recipes. guideposts.org/thanksgivingrecipes Practice Gratitude Want to put more gratitude in your attitude? Check out our slide show for five ways to be more grateful at guideposts.org/gratitude Living With Cancer Find help and hope, including stories from survivors and expert advice at guideposts.org/cancer. Serve Our Soldiers Guideposts offers inspiration to U.S. troops and their families around the world. Learn about our outreach programs and how you too can help a service member. guideposts.org/soldiers…

T‘hank you’ is the best prayer that anyone could say. I say that one a lot. ‘Thank you’ expresses extreme gratitude, humility, understanding.” Pulitzer-prize-winning writer ALICE WALKER “I feel it’s healthier to look out at the world through a window rather than through a mirror. With a mirror, all you see is yourself and whatever is behind you.” Grammy-award-winning singer BILL WITHERS “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.” author MELODY BEATTIE “The bad news: Time flies. The good news: You’re the pilot.” from the book Treat Me, Not My Age, by MARK LACHS “Silence…

DO YOU REMEMBER THE old game show Name That Tune? Contestants would try to predict how few notes they would need to hear in order to correctly identify the song being played: “I can name that tune in four notes!” Well, I hardly ever do things briefly. I have lots to say, and it’s all important! Until I was challenged by a project one of my students was doing in her church: summarize your faith in six words. Impossible! I thought, until I started wrestling with what I might actually say in six words. What, amid all I knew and talked about, really mattered to me? I’ll tell you in a minute what I finally came up with after literally hours of struggle and false starts. But perhaps more important…

Sleet pelted the windshield. I sat in my car in the Walmart parking lot rummaging through my purse. It was late. I just wanted to get home. But where were my keys? Good thing I’d forgotten to lock the doors or I’d be stuck outside, shivering. The keys had to be somewhere—I’d driven here, hadn’t I? I cried out in frustration, “Dear God, can’t you see I need a little help?” Fighting the pre-Christmas crowds at the store had been a headache. Literally. My head was pounding by the time I got all my shopping done. Gifts for my son and daughter, for my boyfriend, Gary, and my sister Renee. It had taken a while to find everything and the checkout line was endless. I’d hustled my shopping cart through…

ALL MY LIFE I FELT GUIDED, secure in the knowledge that God had a plan for me. Then came a time in my early thirties when I wondered if I’d made a mistake, if maybe I’d completely misread what God wanted my husband, Paul, and me to do. That day Paul came into the kitchen, his face so ghostly white I thought he was about to pass out. “Our bank account is down to almost nothing,” he said. “And there’s not much money coming in. If we don’t get more clients soon we’re going to have to close the business or move in with my mother.” “We can’t give up. Something will come through,” I said. But I could feel a knot in my chest. Paul never questioned himself. His…

“My dear Mrs. Daily,” the sad letter began. It was from an Army chaplain. He had been with Mrs. Daily’s son, Leonard, when he died, in an Army field hospital not far from the front. “I remember him as a very fine young man who won the hearts of us all completely. You will always have the memory of a beautiful boy who did his full duty and lived a complete life.” That letter was written in 1919 to my father’s aunt. Reading it over all these years later, I can’t help but think of how many families of the fallen have received such a letter through the centuries, even to this day. Not long ago, Veterans Day seemed to have devolved into an excuse for furniture sales or perhaps…

THANKSGIVING DAY YOU CAN find the Osteen family gathered around the table counting our blessings, like most Americans. But the secret to a happy life is to practice gratitude all year long, every day. It’s a matter of perspective. There’s always something to be dissatisfied about. But equally, there is something even greater to be grateful for if you look hard enough. I recently read about a man who died in extreme poverty. After the funeral his relatives went to his ratty apartment to gather up his belongings. He had a painting they sold at a garage sale. The person who bought it discovered it had been painted back in the 1800s by a famous artist. It ended up selling at an auction for more than three million dollars. That…

I STUCK MY HANDS UNDER THE faucet and scrubbed away the remnants of the day. Dirt, hay and horsehair. Such was life in the country, and I loved its wholesome, gritty glory. I’d swept the barn, fed the horses for the night. Time to feed the family. My husband, Mark, was at work. That left my 16-year-old daughter, Haley, and me. Haley sat at the kitchen counter, her long dark hair obscuring her face. She didn’t even look up from her phone. Seemed like just yesterday she was glued to my side, asking if she could help me peel the potatoes for dinner. “Are you hungry?” I asked Haley. “Nah, I ate earlier,” she mumbled. Teenagers. They ate earlier and slept later. These days, Haley did everything on her own…

THERE ARE PROBABLY THOUSANDS of veterans who have a story like mine: Enlisted in the Army. Got deployed. Saw combat. Got blasted by an IED. I signed up at age 20 and trained as a combat medic because my dad had been one. The day my squad got hit in Iraq in 2005, our crew, in a Humvee, was okay. But I wasn’t able to save the driver of the car across the road. The guilt ate at me. Voices in my head taunted me by day. You’re worthless. Kill yourself. Nightmares haunted my sleep. I talked to the chaplain but still felt guilty, not just about the guys I couldn’t save, but that I was struggling while buddies with more severe injuries were sucking it up and soldiering on.…

Through her work as a cofounder of Home Instead Senior Care, Lori Hogan has come to understand that you need inspiration, encourage-ment and faith to care for a loved one. That’s why she wrote a book of devotions, Strength for the Moment. Here are some Bible verses Lori recommends for caregivers: • If you feel overwhelmed: “Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” —Matthew 11:28–30 • If you’re wondering what God’s plan is in all this: Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean…

YOU DOING ANYTHING SPECIAL for Thanksgiving?” If one more person asked me that, I was going to lose it. I just wanted the whole thing to be over with. Like most years. Thanksgiving had never been the happiest holiday for me. When I was little, it was fun seeing my cousins, aunts and uncles. Then my father left. Thanksgiving dinner became subdued, less a celebration and more a reminder of how my family was splitting apart, not coming together. Now I was divorced. The past year had been such a downer for me. I’d had to move to a smaller, cheaper apartment. Then my hours had been cut back at my bookstore job. I didn’t feel like being around a lot of people, let alone pretending to be thankful for…

UNEXPECTED REFILL My daughter called, her voice tense. “Can you pick up Daiquon?” she asked. “I’m stuck at work and there’s no way I can get there in time!” If my grandson wasn’t picked up promptly from his after-school program one of the teachers would have to stay with him and there would be an extra charge that my daughter was trying to avoid. The evening was bitter cold and stinging as I ran to my car. I knew that my gas tank was almost empty. I had been putting off getting gas until the next day, when I would get paid. I had no time or money to fill the tank up now. I closed my eyes and prayed, God, please just get me to Daiquon on time. I…

WISH YOU WERE HERE In the January 2015 Pass It On, Allison Churchill wrote about postcrossing.com, which connects people around the globe through postcards. It sounded fun. Now I’m hooked! I’ve sent nearly 50 postcards to— and received as many from—20 different countries. I read the recipient profiles and try to pick out just the right card. Of course receiving a postcard selected for me makes me smile. My favorite so far is a heart-shaped postcard of a funicular in a Taiwanese forest. They’re all going in an album. What a wonderful way to promote understanding—and to find we have many more similarities than differences. BARBARA ELLIOTTSANDERS San Diego, California PICTURE PERFECT Stacy Pearsall’s story, “Focused,” in the November 2014 Guideposts, left a big impression on me. She was an…

THAT’S THE EXPRESSION NINE-YEAR-OLD DYLAN Siegel uses to describe anything awesome. Especially his best bud, Jonah Pournazarian. The two met in pre-K at a Jewish day school in Los Angeles. It didn’t take long for Dylan to notice that Jonah was sick. He is one of only about 600 people in the country with glycogen storage disease type 1b, an incurable genetic condition. He lacks the liver enzyme that turns glycogen into glucose, so his body can’t regulate bloodsugar levels. Seven times a day, at school and through the night, Jonah is fed water and cornstarch through a tube in his stomach. Missing just one feeding could be fatal. When the boys were in first grade, Jonah’s parents asked friends and family for donations for GSD research. Dylan had an…

RAVIOLI SATURDAY. the day is a family tradition going back to when my grandma was alive. Trevisans gather at my parents’ house in late November to make a huge batch of Grandma’s ravioli for the family Christmas Eve dinner. I’m the oldest of 10, so fitting our ravioli-making operation into our parents’ cozy kitchen is quite a feat. We grind the meat, chop spinach, onions, garlic and parsley for the filling, and roll out the dough together. There’s lots of good-natured joking. But I didn’t feel up to it that year. The thought of putting on a happy face with everybody…I’d rather have crawled in a hole. I’d worked for the same organization for 30 years when out of the blue I was let go. I managed to find other…

Dylan Siegel (Best Friends, page 14) wrote a book to raise money to find a cure for his best friend, Jonah Pournazarian, who has glycogen storage disease. Now the nineyear-old is encouraging kids to use their creativity to help a cause they care about. “He’s done this amazing thing and wants to share his story with kids everywhere,” says his dad, David Siegel. The Chocolate Bar team uses Facebook (facebook.com/chocolatebarbook) to connect Dylan with families and educators around the world. Dylan also travels to talk to other kids in person—including a trip to America’s chocolate capital, Hershey, Pennsylvania, where he spent hours answering questions ranging from “What’s it like to write a book?” to “What can I do?” David gives a lot of credit to his wife, Debra. “She’s always…