Gratitude...

It is really late, and I have been up all night doing homework, so I hope this makes sense in the morning. We were watching "Amazing Race" as a family and the challange took place in Switzerland up on a very beautiful mountain that looked unreal it was so beautiful. The challange was the contestants had to ride a gondola up to the top of a mountain and parasail off. If you didn't want to jump off, or didn't want to wait for favorable wind conditions, you could run down the mountain instead. At the beginning of the challenge, one team member was chosen to jump and one had to go to the bottom of the mountain and wait. I know you are wondering what this has to do with gratitude, just stick with me. There was one older gentelman who wanted to do the parasailing, he had hurt himself in a previous challange, and couldn't run down the mountain. So many other teams got tired of waiting for the wind to allow them to jump that one by one they all started running down the mountain (it was a one hour jog). The older man was getting so frustrated because the wind wouldn't change, and everyone was getting ahead of him. He then said: "I can't ask God to help me with this insignificant thing, all I can do is just be grateful that I am here in this place, and be grateful for the opportunity that I have had to see this beautiful mountain." And right then (through the magic of television) the wind changed and he could jump. He was the only one who got to parasail because all the others ran down. I was just greatly struck that GRATITUDE CHANGES THINGS. Often times I think things should go a certain way, but when I am just grateful for the experience, even if it turns out diffrent from what I was planning, gratitude makes it all okay.