On Sunday, I received a note from a friend I hadn’t seen in over ten years. He was fundraising for a cause close to his heart. See, his son was born with a rare liver disease and over the years, my friend donated part of his own to help his kid. I always thought that was the end of the story. No, the now young adult will live with this rare disease his entire life; his life will not be as long as that of most of the rest of us, and because of the rarity (and therefore obscurity) of the disease, it is tough to raise money for research.

We have so much to be grateful for, don’t we?

Another friend sent me a GoFundMe for a Ukrainian gentleman who was looking to raise nine thousand dollars for a coffee roaster. He had arrived on this side of the world in May of 2022 from his war-torn country with nothing but the clothes on his back. He set up a business using everything he knew from back home. Roasting and serving premium coffee. And for the first time, he was asking for help — to elevate the experience for his customers.

We have so much to be grateful for, don’t we?

And then Hamas revealed to the world what modern-day barbarism looks like.

I was not born Jewish, so I can’t pretend to know what generational trauma the Israelis have endured. In my twenties, I spent one day touring Dachau (one of the concentration camps used in World War Two) and images from that torture chamber are forever seared into my mind’s eye. So, I am as horrified as you are by the daily news updates of modern-day torture. Yes, the whole thing is a political nightmare and very complicated. Yet I stand with Israel. And hope it can bring a swift end to the bloodshed.

We have so much to be grateful for, don’t we?

I am sharing these three different stories for one reason. We all get so caught up in our own worlds, problems and lives that we completely forget there are other people in the world. Worse, we forget to care about others who are not nearly as fortunate as we are.

The world could use a bit more caring these days. And that’s really what I want to remind us all of today. We have so much to be grateful for, don’t we?