In, But Not Of by Hugh Hewitt

Author:Hugh Hewitt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook, book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2012-04-17T04:00:00+00:00

• CHAPTER 23 •

FILL THE GRATITUDE GAP

IN THE PRECEDING CHAPTER, I REMINDED YOU OF THE debts that you owe others. Now I’d like to prompt you to act on that recognition. Make a list of the folks you owe. Do it in the margin. Do it now.

Start with family, and keep in mind that even a pain-in-the-neck sister may have been the key to your happiness via a sacrifice you have chosen to forget or a favor long forgotten.

Then move chronologically. There’s a reason why most people can name every one of their teachers: each one impacts them in deep and inescapable ways. Some of these impacts are profoundly negative. But others change the trajectory of a person’s life to a better and higher arc.

There’s a reason why the movie Stand and Deliver inspired. We know that there is a great truth in the ability of a teacher to change lives. Pick up any presidential memoir and see if the writer does not pause to name at least one teacher.

Jay Mathews, the education writer for the Washington Post, wrote a column singing the praises of high school guidance counselors. After I read it on the air, the reaction was extraordinary. Caller after caller phoned in to echo Mathews’s generic praise with a specific account of the help given them by a guidance counselor.

Coaches figure prominently in the lists of indebtedness I have seen.

Teachers. Coaches. Then mentors and friends. These are the geological layers of your success. There is no obvious advantage in making a count of these debts and of acknowledging that list.

But it is absolute protection against pride and thus a strong guardrail against becoming “of the world.”

PLEASE SEE STUDY GUIDE FOR CHAPTERS 22 AND 23.

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