By Ada Brownell
I interviewed Dr. Joyce Brothers for the newspaper where I worked and she said something that caught my attention.
She believed married people should thank each other more often. Her idea was to stop nagging your mate to do a job that needs doing. You ask kindly and if or when the job’s done, say “Thank you,” Dr. Brothers said. She emphasized mates treated in this fashion will help each other more, and the atmosphere in the home will change for the better.
I tried her advice, and it works. No, it didn’t happen with the first couple of Thank yous, but when I showed appreciation I got more help. My own attitude also improved.
It’s been years since we started thanking one another for even little things, we’ve made it a habit. What an improvement giving thanks has made in our marriage.
God gave us similar advice in the Bible. Paul said in I Corinthians 13 the loving person is kind, joyful, loving, patient, gentle, faithful and full of self control (Galatians 5:22). These are all fruits of the Holy Spirit, and need to be cultivated. Being thankful is the beginning of growing greater things in our lives.
Let us not be among those Paul told Timothy would live in the perilous last days: “For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money … unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power” (2 Timothy 3:1-5 NKJ).
Thanking one another, with kindness, separates us from that crowd.
First shared in-The Pentecostal Evangel, February 29, 2004
MEET ADA BROWNELL
The eighth child and the sixth redhead in a family of achievers, Ada Nicholson Brownell writes with stick-to-your-soul encouragement from her Missouri home where she lives with her handsome husband who is the father of their five children—not one of them with red hair or freckles.
Her latest novel is Peach Blossom Rancher.
PEACH BLOSSOM RANCHER
The groans of a woman in the throes of birth pangs come from the barn loft of John Lincoln Parks. Who is it? He has enough to do trying to restore his horse herd and bring the peach orchards back to bearing fruit. Polly the cook/housekeeper delivers the baby, but John keeps finding people who need him or a miracle. The woman he hopes to marry is trying to get people wrongly held there out of the asylum for the insane. His neighbor, Edwina Jorgenson, is trying to run her father’s ranch since he was disabled, and now she has a peeping Tom. The peeper’s bootprints left under the windows are like those in John’s barn after a body was dropped there.
Will John achieve his goals and dreams, regain his faith, or be tried for murder? http://amzn.to/2arRVgG
Jennifer Hallmark 
Not only do I do thank my husband for small things, I also thank my children in the hopes they will learn to appreciate small kindnesses done by others.