religion
Give back this Proactive Gratitude Thanksgiving 6
Southern Accent
Edyn-Mae Stevenson Religion Editor
Edyn-Mae Stevenson Religion Editor
In light of the upcoming holiday season, it’s the perfect time of year to take a step back, look at your life and realize what you’re thankful for. It’s also the perfect time to reevaluate what you’re doing for others and decide what more you could be doing in the upcoming year. Here are a few public service opportunities available in Chattanooga. Chattanooga Area Food Bank You can help eliminate hunger in the Chattanooga area by organizing a virtual food drive at chattfoodbank.org, or you can go volunteer. With the Chattanooga Area Food Bank, one hour of volunteer work can equal 92 meals. You can even take a group. Signing up is easy on their website, so get out there and turn your service hours into meals for the hungry. End Slavery Tennessee Human trafficking is still an incredibly relevant issue
in today’s society. In fact, it’s happening right here in Chattanooga. Organizations like End Slavery are working to bring a stop to labor and sex trafficking in Tennessee, and you can help by volunteering. They have all sorts of volunteering opportunities, including cooking meals for residents of a safe house or working with friends to gather things like shampoo, conditioner and body wash in order to meet the material needs of survivors. You can do that and more if you go to their website, endslavertytn.org. Get involved at school I don’t know about you, but I’ve yet to take advantage of Southern’s service opportunities. There are all sorts of ways to serve through school. Log on and take a look at all of the great things you can be a part of, or stop and see Jennifer Carter at the Christian Service office to assess your volunteer options. There’s always going to be a need for service. This Thanksgiving, let’s give back.
This is an adorable turkey; be thankful!
I’ve noticed throughout the years that a lot of teachers and other authority figures like to use Thanksgiving to remind us that we should be grateful all year round and not just during the holidays. Though I find the sentiment over-used and cliché, I think it holds a lot of merit in today’s society. We wait until the holidays to look back and reflect on what the year has brought us, and it’s meant to be a reminder that we should always be giving God our thanks. But the further and further we go from the holidays, the easier it is to forget to be proactively grateful. Years ago, when I was in Pathfinders, one of the exercises we did to pass our level was to sit alone each night for
Thursday, November 16, 2017
“Proactively searching for reasons to be grateful changes your outlook on life and your outlook on God.”
eight minutes and only think of things we were thankful for. At first, I would come up with things like, “I’m thankful for my family and friends,” or “I’m thankful for a roof over my head.” But, as the eight minutes would drag on, I would have to get creative. The prolonged silence asked me to think deeper into my day to see the tiny, almost insignificant, details that made my life so much better. In high school, my youth pastor asked a similar thing of us. She gave us each a small notebook and told us to fill it with
lists of things we were thankful for. She challenged us to come up with one thousand gifts that God had given us and then to keep going further and further into our gratitude. Proactively searching for reasons to be grateful changes your outlook on life and your outlook on God. It’s impossible to be melancholy when you’re counting your blessings so meticulously. So turn off the noise of your life this Thanksgiving. Set a timer, sit in silence, and write down some reasons to be grateful. Keep going and going until you can’t keep count anymore.
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