Thanksgiving Reflections

Here at The Resource Group, we do everything we can to serve the physicians, nurses, and caregivers at the hospitals in which we are privileged to serve. While our work is change management, operations & logistics, and strategic sourcing, our spirit is hospitality. Simply put, we care about the people we serve. At the same time, we are challenged to look beyond what’s right in front of us, especially at Thanksgiving.

This year, maybe we can challenge ourselves to stretch our attention and our gratitude a little further, to include some people we might normally miss in our lives, specifically the people that are invisible to us as we move through our days. We might think first of the poor or homeless, those we walk and drive past without a second thought as we hurry from home to work or from restaurant to theater or from parking lot to church. Or maybe we could consider those who do the jobs we would never dream of doing: the housekeepers, the garbage collectors, and the fast-food dishwashers. Or maybe the people we disagree with and convince ourselves aren't worth noticing, or the people that work in the same building but whose names we have never bothered to learn, or our own children as we walk in the door at the end of a difficult day with our arms so full of frustration and disappointment that we can't receive their hugs.

Or maybe it is the people who are different from us that might expand our gratitude: the woman who speaks her mind a little too directly for us , or the man who can't seem to understand our point of view, or that person with the confusing accent or unfamiliar dress, or the one that lives in a part of town that we have never seen, or one whose face betrays years of suffering we have never known, or the veteran who is proud of a sacrifice we don't understand, or the one who seems to want a different country than us.

As we consider these people in our lives, the ones we see quite clearly but might wish we could dismiss, can we go beyond simple tolerance and acceptance and stretch ourselves to a real sense of gratitude, knowing it is gratitude that opens us to the gift that we may not know we need - the gift that other person may hold.

Together, we make our world what it is – one person at a time.