Happy Boy!

gratitude. Thank you Jesus.

I found this excellent explanation of why I am always happier with my life when I am doing everything in the spirit of gratitude for everything in my life and decided I would like to share it with you all.  It was written by the noted American Philosopher Paul K. Moser of Loyola University in Chicago (click here to see original website, and click here to check out a few of his wonderful books.):

Gratitude:

(the following is an excerpt of a piece written by Paul K. Moser)

The Maker of heaven and earth has, out of merciful love, embarked on a rescue operation toward us, His enemies. We have rebelled against God in ways that leave us in bondage to selfishness, idols, and death. God, however, has not responded in kind. Instead, He has sent Jesus, His Son, to befriend us, His enemies. In the life and death of Jesus, God offers forgiveness and reconciliation to all people, and proves His love for all people. How are we to respond to this Good News of amazing mercy toward us? How are we to enter in to the friendship offered?

We must be grateful to God if we are to enter in to loving friendship with Him. In particular, we must be grateful, above all else, to God for His merciful love in Jesus. Such a response of gratitude is the gateway to trust, hope, and spiritual healing in God, our Rescuer. We should think of gratitude as a central ingredient in Jesus’s love commands. In particular, we should understand those commands as prescribing gratitude as follows:

The most important commandment requires this: Be thankful for the Lord your God and His Son Jesus with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength. The second commandment requires this: Be as thankful for your neighbor as you are for yourself. There is no commandment greater than these. (cf. Mk. 12:28-31)

When our gratitude conforms to these two commandments, we are attuned to the living God. Our gratitude will then bear lasting fruit, even the fruit of God’s Spirit (see Gal. 5:22-23), in how we are and live. We will then have lasting joy, come what may. Such gratitude cannot be self-made by humans. It comes as a gift from the living God, who alone can empower us, through His Spirit, to put love and thanks toward Him first in our lives.

Ingratitude, as the refusal to be grateful to God, is spiritual sickness and rebellion against God. Such ingratitude rests on the arrogant presumption that a human is in a position to judge the perfectly loving God to be unworthy of gratitude. It exalts human standards for what is worthy of gratitude above God’s standards. Something is very wrong with this picture: the selfish creature is presuming to find fault with the perfectly loving Creator. Ingratitude toward God is perhaps the most fatal human sickness. It motivates idolatry (see Romans 1:21-23), and leaves a person joyless, frustrated, and angry. In the end, the ungrateful life is not worth living.

Americans lost almost 600,000 jobs in January 2009, making that 3.6 million jobs lost since recession began in December 2007

Published in the New York Times today, excerpt below:

By EDMUND L. ANDREWS

Published: February 6, 2009

WASHINGTON — The United States lost almost 600,000 jobs last month and the unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent, its highest level in more than 16 years, the Labor Department said Friday.

It was the biggest monthly job loss since the economy tipped into a recession more than a year ago, and it was even worse than most forecasters had been predicting. In addition, the government revised the estimates for previous months to include another 400,000 job losses. For December, the government revised the job loss to 577,000 compared with an initial reading of 524,000. Overall, it said, the nation has lost 3.6 million jobs since it slipped into a recession in December 2007….(click here to read the rest!)

I am so thankful for the wonderful things in my life. Do right, work hard and be of service to others and you will be rewarded. This is a wonderful world and a wonderful life. :)

The key to my success has always been gratitude. I believe the events of my life have proven to me that if you work hard, always maintain gratitude for everything in your life and always seek to be of service to others, then you will be justly rewarded and can look back content in knowing that you lived the right way.  I am thankful.  I am happy.

US History 2006-December 2008

2006: both Ford and General Motors post huge losses and lay off thousands of workers
2006: after George W Bush appoints another Roman catholic to the Supreme Court, the majority of the Supreme Court judges are Catholics for the first time in the history of the USA
2006: Exxon Mobil posts the largest profit of any company in USA history
2006: the USA has 1,210 megachurches (churches for 2,000 or more people) that draw more than four million people a week
2006: the USA and India sign a nuclear agreement
2006: Christian fundamentalist governor Mike Rounds of South Dakota bans abortion
2006: the USA admits that marines killed 25 civilians in cold blood in the Iraqi town of Haditha
2006: the USA has 300 million people, of which 35 million are foreign-born, and it is the third most populous country in the world after China and India
2006: Warren Buffet donates $37 billion to charity, the largest donation ever
2006: most immigrants to the USA are Mexicans
2006: after six years the Dow Jones index trades above its record high close of 11,722
2006: Enron’s CEO Jeffrey Skilling is sentenced to 24 years in prison
2006: the world-wide web has 100 million websites
2006: Marijuana is the largest cash crop in the USA ($35 billion)
2006: the first Muslim ever is elected to the USA Congress (Keith Ellison)
2006: the USA bombs Islamists in Somalia as Ethiopia help push them out of Somalia
2007: the USA trade deficit hits a record $764 bilion
2007: South Korean student Cho Seung-Hui kills 32 people at Virginia Tech
2007: China overtakes the USA to become the world’s second largest exporter and overtakes Canada to become the main exporter to the USA
2007: Toyota passes General Motors as the world’s largest car manufacturer and Japanese car manufacturers pass USA car manufacturers even in the USA market
2007: USA government agencies declare that Al Qaeda has regrouped in Pakistan and that the terrorist threat against the USA has increased
2007: after crashing due to the crisis of sub-prime mortgage lenders, the USA stock market sets a new record high
2007: Texas carries out its 400th death penalty
2007: the USA dollar falls to 1:2 to the British pound and to an all-time low of 1.50 to the euro and is worth less than a Canadian dollar for the first time in three decades
2007: a fund of the United Arab Emirates buys a 4.9% stake in Citigroup for $7.5 billion, making it the single largest shareholder, ahead of Prince Walid bin Talal of Saudi Arabia
2007: home prices fall 5.1%, the sharpest drop in 20 years
2007: at the end of the economic expansion of the 2000s the median income of USA families has declined from $61,000 to $60,500
2007: Piyush “Bobby” Jindal becomes the first Indian-American governor in the history of the USA (governor of Louisiana)
jan 2008: Barack Obama, a black man, is the leading candidate for president of the USA
jan 2008: Gold reaches an all-time high of $880
jan 2008: the stock market collapses, triggering similar collapses around the world
jan 2008: the Encyclopedia of Life (Eol.org) goes on line
feb 2008: more than 1% of adult USA citizens is in prison
mar 2008: the price of gold hits $1,000 for the first time ever and oil passes $110 a barrel, while the dollar sets another all-time low against the euro (1.56) and dips below 100 yen (a drop of 6.5% in less than three months), home prices plunge 9.1%, the Eurozone overtakes the USA as the world’s largest economy
mar 2008: five years after the invasion, the USA has lost 4,000 soldiers in Iraq
mar 2008: the police raid a polygamist compound with hundreds of children in Eldorado, Texas, run by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints
june 2008: oil price hits $139 a barrel

june 2008: a USA air strike kills 11 Pakistani soldiers
june 2008: California legalizes gay marriage
june 2008: President George W Bush’s job approval falls to 23%, one of the lowest ever recorded
june 2008: For the first time more USA soldiers die in the war in Afghanistan than in the war in Iraq
july 2008: George W Bush’s associate Karl Rove refuses to testify before a commission investigating whether the Justice Department prosecuted people for political reasons
july 2008: George W Bush’s aide Karl Rove is accused of having engineered the dismissals of prosecutors on political grounds
july 2008: USA inflation hits a 26-year High
july 2008: Republican senator Ted Stevens of Alaska is indicted of corruption
august 2008: The USA and Libya restore diplomatic relationships that were broken after Reagan bombed Libya
august 2008: Following Russia’s invasion of Georgia, the USA and Poland sign a treaty for a missile defense
august 2008: A USA bomb kills 90 Afghan civilians including 60 children
sep 2008: NATO killed 3,200 civilians in Afghanistan from 2005 to mid 2008
sep 2008: Having repaired relations, Condy Rice becomes the first USA secretary of state to visit Libya since 1953
sep 2008: The USA takes over the two largest mortgage companies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and the largest insurance company, American International Group
sep 2008: USA missiles target Taliban inside Pakistan
sep 2008: In a financial crisis, Lehman Brothers files for bankruptcy and Merrill Lynch is sold to Bank of America, and the government buys $700 billion of bad mortgages in the largest financial bailout since the Great Depression, and on September 29 the Dow Jones loses 778 points, the biggest single-day point loss ever
sep 2008: A bomb against the USA embassy in Yemen kills 16 people
oct 2008: the Dow Jones loses more 22% in a week of continuous losses, including the biggest single-day decline since 1987
oct 2008: Unemployment reaches 6.5%, the highest rate since march 1994.
nov 2008: Barack Obama, a black man, is elected president of the USA
nov 2008: the world’s oldest person, Edna Parker, dies at the age of 115
Dec 2008: the price of oil plunges to $34 per barrel amid the world recession
Dec 2008: The median home price falls 13.2% from a year before, down to $181,300, the largest drop since the Great Depression
Dec 2008: The USA loses two million jobs in 2008 and the unemployment rate climbs to 6.7%
Dec 2008: More USA workers lost jobs in 2008 than in any year since World War II, with employers laying off 2.6 million people.
Dec 2008: The USA loses $3.6 trillion in the financial crisis