E  mmanuel from Pastor Kurt Busiek

Hope your Thanksgiving week went well. 

Prayer updates:

Baby Landon Butterfield had a good Thanksgiving week.  He is still struggling but he was able to enjoy all the family that visited over the holiday weekend and even sat for a professional family photo portrait.

Kathy Alfred is back home and doing very well considering how sick she was last week.

Virginia Gray is back in St. Joseph with a fractured arm caused by a recent fall.

Bob McVay has started dialysis treatments at Camden Clarke.

Here are two stories I read recently and found interesting.   Take care.

I saw a troubling quote today. I was reading a news story about an NYPD detective named James Zadroga who had died from lung problems. Following 9/11, he had worked for months at Ground Zero and breathed in a lot of contaminated air. He was a hero.
Later, though, it was discovered that he might have been injecting drugs—ground up pills—that contributed to his lung disease.

Commenting on the story, Dr. Terence Keane, who heads the behavioral science division of the Department of Veterans Affairs' National Center for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder, said: "We might think of [emergency workers] as stress resilient, but the reality is that the on-the-job pressure for these emergency service workers can be overwhelming."
Then Keane made the statement that really caught my attention: "Their job is 95 percent boredom and 5 percent terror."

What a terrible way to live, I thought. They live lives marked by two emotions no one wants: long stretches of boredom broken up unpredictably by short stretches of terror. What a grinding toll that would take on your soul.

Emergency workers are not the only ones whose daily lives may involve a regular swing between two troubling emotions. Some of you who are in deep financial debt might describe your lives as 95 percent pressure and 5 percent despair. You who are in a broken marriage might describe your life as 95 percent anger and 5 percent depression. You who have a life-threatening disease might describe your life as 95 percent fear and 5 percent resignation.

Whatever your situation, the painful mix of emotions can be taking a terrible toll on your soul.

Robert Emmons, PhD, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, and psychology professor Michael McCullough of the University of Miami, have long been interested in the role gratitude plays in physical and emotional well being.

They took three groups of volunteers and randomly assigned them to focus on one of three things each week: hassles, things for which they were grateful, and ordinary life events.

The first group concentrated on everything that went wrong or that irritated them. The second group honed in on situations they felt enhanced their lives, such as, "My boyfriend is so kind and caring—I'm lucky to have him." The third group recalled recent everyday events, such as, "I went shoe shopping."

The results: The people who focused on gratitude were happier. They saw their lives in favorable terms. They reported fewer negative physical symptoms such as headaches or colds, and they were active in many ways that were good for them. Those who were grateful quite simply enjoyed a higher quality of life.

Emmons was surprised. "This is not just something that makes people happy, like a positive-thinking/optimism kind of thing. A feeling of gratitude really gets people to do something, to become more pro-social, more compassionate." Such was not the case in either of the other two groups.