Blessings surround you and me. We’re truly ecstatic about them, when we give it some thought. However, our bounty tends to hide from our consciousness.
The human brain works like a zoom lens. I’m a photographer, as you know; I have the 28 to 300 mm Canon zoom lens. When I zoom that lens to 300mm, it can make a lizard fill the screen. Lizard is all you see. Even the detail of whatever beauty lies beyond the lizard renders as an unrecognizable blur. 
The brain’s zoom lens, in a similar way, tends to zoom in on the lizards of life. The lizard fills the frame and predicts problems sure to come. (Please forgive me if you are a lizard lover. I don’t mean to defame the lovely creature, its just a picture I had on file and most of us wouldn’t want a lizard crawling around inside our head so it seemed to be an adequate analogy for the point I wanted to make.) Anyway, when your negative thoughts take your full attention, the brain’s chemical factory kicks in to flood your body with a nasty concoction of emotional soup. It sours your attitude, lowers your outlook, (I’m not speaking of the program on your computer) and according to Dr. Caroline Leaf, can make you seriously ill. For 28 years, she has studied the human brain. With her recent volume, Who Switched Off My Brain? ,she records her findings. (Highly recommended!)
Today is Thanksgiving Day, a good day for you and I to zoom out to our brain’s wide-angle view of life… to notice the beauty, the delightful, the wonderful things that fill them. This morning I walked the path I usually take. I started thanking God that I could hear the sound of the bike that sailed past and the chirp of the bird perched safely in the tree…that I could see the blue sky and the majesty of the mountain nearby…that I could walk…and that I could come back here and write this note to you.
Something wonderful happened inside my skull. My brain which can cook up a nasty bowl of negative emotional soup is also ready, at a moment’s notice, to prepare thanksgiving dinner with all the trimmings. As I walked and said some thankful thoughts, it started making deliveries to every cell in my body. Thanksgiving transforms the attitude, lifts your outlook. It honors God because all good things come from God. It can be even be a healthy thing to do.