Life
Tri-County Press
November 25, 2009
B3
Text-messaging God on Thanksgiving Day (To be prayed alone or with others before the main Thanksgiving meal.) Lord God, as children of our culture we are seldom at peace with what we have. We are more conscious of what we do not have and believe our happiness will come from having more. We gather together today, however, to thank you for all you have given us and for all that others have given us. Help us each day to take delight in the simple things of life, appreciate the love of those close to us, and
acknowledge how fortunate we really are. W e r e c a l l today the of Father Lou words the GerGuntzelman man mysPerspectives tic, Meister Eckhart, who said, “If the only prayer you ever say in your life is ‘Thanks!’ that will suffice.” He knew that to genuinely experience gratitude,
we must realize first of all that we have received, from whom we have received, and that ultimately every good thing in our lives comes from a beneficent God. So, for reasons known only in the stillness of our grateful hearts, each of us can our own the following Thanksgiving Day prayer:
O Divine Giver of Gifts
I stand beneath an endless waterfall of your abundant gifts to me. I thank you especially
for the blessing of life itself, the most precious of all your gifts to me. I thank you, Ever-Generous One, for clothing to wear, for food and drink to nourish my body, for books and music, for the ability to give and receive love, for all the talents and skills you’ve bestowed upon me. I thank you for the many joys of my life, for my family and my friends, for work that gives me a sense of purpose and invests my life with meaning.
I thank you as well for the sufferings and trials of my life, which in a paradoxical way, are also your gifts- and which, together with my mistakes, are among my most important teachers. I thank you for all my deceased relatives and friends who, over many generations, have contributed in unimaginable ways and helped bring me to this day and to become the person I am. Grant that I may never greet a new day without the awareness of some gift
for which to give your thanks, O God. And may constant thanksgiving be my song until I sing it forever in your heaven of endless gifts and love, Amen Father Lou Guntzelman is a Catholic priest of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Reach him at s or contact him directly at P.O. Box 428541, Cincinnati, OH 45242. Please include a mailing address or fax number if you wish for him to respond.
Be alarmed if you haven’t tested your security system Many people have home security systems to protect them in the event of a fire or break-in. But, if you have such a system, when was the last time you checked to make sure it is being properly monitored? If it’s been awhile, you could be in for a rude awakening. John Witmer of Florence relies on his security system to not only sound an alarm in his neighborhood but call the police or fire department if necessary. “We moved here in 1989, and we had the alarm system installed when we moved in. The house had already been hard-wired for it, so we just activated it with the Rollins Company,” said Witmer. The contract called for continuous monitoring of the alarm system at a
monthly cost of $26. “We know it worked because one of our neighbors Howard Ain came in Hey Howard! one time with a key, inadvertently while we were gone, and the police and fire department showed up to harass her – so we know the system functioned,” he said. In 1997, Security Link took over from Rollins and four years later ADT bought them out. “The only contact we had with ADT – they made a phone call and asked us how we wanted to be billed, a check deduction or send a bill, and we wanted a bill,” Witmer said.
They continued to receive and pay monitoring bills for eight years until, “A couple of weeks ago my wife inadvertently bumped into our emergency medical button and the alarm went off in the house,” Witmer said. They turned off the alarm and called ADT to say it was a false alarm.“We called, they answered and said, ‘What event.’ Well, one thing led to another and we started testing the system,” Witmer said. The problem is, although ADT was now billing Witmer, the alarm system was still programmed to call a now non-existent phone number at Rollins. So, although ADT was billing for monitoring, it really wasn’t able to receive the call. Witmer says he’s learned a valuable lesson.
“We were just flabbergasted to find out we weren’t being monitored,” said Witmer. Because so many years have elapsed since he signed that Rollins contract, there’s no documentation to show which type of monitoring service plan Witmer had signed up for – the company periodic testing or customer testing.
ADT has now offered to refund some of Witmer’s money, put in a new system, and provide three years worth of free monitoring. Bottom line, no matter which company you have, you need to have periodic tests of your home security system to make sure everything is working. But first call the alarm company to say you’re
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going to set it off so they can put it in the test position. Troubleshooter Howard Ain answers consumer complaints and questions weekdays at 5:30 p.m., 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts on WKRC-TV Local 12. You can write to him at Hey Howard, 12 WKRC-TV, 1906 Highland Ave., Cincinnati 45219.
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