My Daily Article today profiles Todd Tilghman, the Mississippi pastor who won The Voice this week. Tilghman was not the only professing Christian in the finals.
Micah Iverson, another finalist, is the son of missionaries. Before the finals, he posted a message on Facebook in which he said, “All I have is gratitude towards God for this cool gift. I didn’t need this. My life is already so full. But He gave it to me and I am grateful. We aren’t entitled to anything in this life, so everything should be received with thanksgiving and joy. And boy am I joyful. So whatever the outcome, join me in thanking God for this cool opportunity and pray I use it well.”
Gratitude is a good theme to embrace today.
On this day in 1999, soap opera star Susan Lucci won her first Emmy after nineteen nominations. She played Erica Kane on the show All My Children, which debuted on January 5, 1970, and went on to portray the character for four decades.
According to History, Erica “married no fewer than eleven times (to eight different men, and several of the marriages were invalid), had several children and grandchildren, was kidnapped, survived an airplane crash and a car accident, battled drug addiction and became the owner of her own cosmetics company (among other notable events).”
By 1991, TV Guide named her “unequivocally the most famous soap-opera character in the history of TV.”
Lucci was first nominated for an Emmy in 1978 and continued to be nominated year after year until she finally won. In her acceptance speech she referred to all the years she did not win the Emmy when she said to her children, “I wasn’t meant to get this award before tonight because if I had, I wouldn’t have that collection of poems and letters and drawings and balloons and chocolate cakes you made me all this time to make me feel better”.
Embracing the power of gratitude
Susan Lucci and Micah Iverson both know two facts we should remember: what we do is not who we are, and what we are is a gift we should celebrate.
Iverson knows his musical talents and the opportunity to do well on The Voice were God’s gift to him. Susan Lucci separated herself from the character she played and knew her children’s affirmation was a gift worth celebrating.
As Micah Iverson noted, “We aren’t entitled to anything in this life.” Everything we have comes to us from the One who created it all. We build houses with materials we derive from the earth. We live in bodies we did not make on a planet we did not create.
As the first law of thermodynamics states, energy in a closed system must remain constant—it can be neither created nor destroyed. The origin of all things is found in the first verse of Scripture: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth” (Genesis 1:1).
As a result, we know that “every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights” (James 1:17).
This day is our Father’s gift.
Will you use it for his glory?
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