We can’t wait until everything is OK—with us or with the rest of the world—to feel thankful, or we will never experience it at all. “The world is too bent for unshadowed joy,” Lewis Smedes points out,...

When the stock market plummeted in 2003 and I lost a third of my savings, I had a very hard time getting over the fact that I didn’t see it coming. Some young part of myself still believed I should be...

I once read a quote by Hugh Downs that said, “A happy person is not a person in a certain set of circumstances, but rather a person with a certain set of attitudes.” We only have to compare two people...

The practice of giving thanks for your body is particularly difficult for women, because our relationships with our bodies are fraught with so much difficulty and dissatisfaction. The media reinforces...

Whenever we’re in a situation that’s changing, the most common initial reaction is denial, followed by anger. Almost immediately many of us respond to unwanted change with a knee-jerk refusal to accep...

It was only when I began to study patience closely that I came to see how anger and patience are related. In fact, anger is the direct consequence of losing our patience. For it is precisely because w...

“What was going on? What do you want?” She looked up at me and wailed, “I just want to be happy.” Don’t we all? No matter who we are or what our circumstances, isn’t that what we each long for? Happin...

To experience happiness in our daily lives does not mean hiding our heads in the sand. It’s not about feeling absolutely wonderful all the livelong day. We’re meant to feel bad as well as good—the par...

Certainly, not everyone is frightened by change. But for those of us who like predictability and routine, times of great change can bring on intense fear. That’s why it’s crucially important to recogn...

I have tremendous patience with people. I can get occasionally frustrated, annoyed, or even angry, but ultimately my patience kicks back in. I simply re­fuse to give up on a living being. You too have...

"I'm hun­gry," I declared. "I need to eat something." Time passed; I got hungrier and hungrier. All the while I was acting like a lunatic, there was a part of me, my still-reasonable self, observing m...