Thanksgiving in April

Last November I wanted to write a post about things I was thankful for, but since I was working overtime at that time, it didn't happen. But Amulek tells us we should "live in thanksgiving daily" (Alma 34:38), and while he is talking about thanksgiving with a lowercase t, I like to think of it as Thanksgiving with a capital T--we shouldn't just give thanks on the fourth Thursday of November; we should be thankful every day of the year.

Besides, there aren't any holidays going on right now.

There's a lot that happened this week that made me thankful for various things.

First of all, there's stuff that I'm thankful for associated with my incident this week. I'm thankful that I wasn't hurt more--all I did was scrape up my knees and hands (and shoulder), when I could have hit my head or could have been passed out longer or could have been run over. I'm thankful that there were no cars around when I landed in the road. I'm thankful it happened when I was so close to home.

And I'm thankful that if I had to get hurt, it was in such a hilarious manner. I always think it's funny when you don't know how you got someplace. It's also funny that one of the first things I thought of when I was coming to was how nice it was just to be lying there taking deep breaths. Then I realized I was relaxing in the middle of the road! It's also funny that my scrapes are on the fronts of my knees and that I was lying face down, yet I managed to get a scrape on the back of my shoulder. I'm not sure how that happened.

I'm thankful for the miracle of the human body. My knees and especially my hands are improving, and yet I do nothing except bandage them and apply Neosporin. If I were a robot, I'd have to get fixed, and there would be a possibility I'd never work quite the same again. But as a human being, I am confident that my skin will fix itself and I will be as good as new. Well, as good as I was before I scraped them. (I was thinking yesterday--when I was a kid, I used to say I "skinned my knees," but now I say I "scraped my knees." I just looked at the Corpus of Contemporary American English and found out that scrape is more common today than skin in the context of knees, but when I looked in the Corpus of Historical American English, I found that skin has been around a lot longer than scrape when referring to knees.)

I'm taking History 202 this term, and I was thinking about this term's reading, as well as Guns, Germs, and Steel, which I read for History 201 last summer. I live in a free country where I can get a good education and good health care and all sorts of luxuries. Of all the countries originally colonized by Europeans, ours is the most successful. To be sure, we have our own unique problems, but overall we are better off than the rest of the world. I am privileged enough that I happened to be born here. I didn't do anything! It was purely a blessing. I almost feel guilty because I didn't do anything for it.

I have also been blessed with a great memory. This memory allows me to do silly things like win arguments (because I can remember the details) and write long blog posts. Today at church a girl told me she read (at least part of) my latest memory post (the one about the past year) and she said it blew her mind that I remembered so much. I was quite surprised she read that post, because I didn't think anyone would read it and because she's not even friends with me on Facebook!

But my memory has far more practical applications than winning arguments and writing blog posts. This week I found out my winter semester grades:

A lot of people think I am really smart. I'm really not. I just have been blessed with a great memory so that I remember what I learned. In some cases, it's almost as if I can remember reading a page and I simply read it again when I'm taking the test.

And these good grades are also helpful for my college career. I am thankful that I am currently (i.e., spring and summer) getting a free education, thanks to scholarships. I found out this week that I get a half-tuition scholarship for fall and winter. I love it here at BYU, and it's especially nice that I get my education for free or at a discount.

There are a lot of other things I'm thankful for, but these are particularly relevant for this week. (Also, Blogger was being a bully to me about putting in the COCA and COHA links, so that kind of made me tired of blogging for now.)