A Day Spent in Prayer Is a Great Day

There are a great many activities we can do, day by day, that get us through the 24 hours without thinking about how we feel cheated or how we feel as if our side was terribly let down by a group of wing nuts who actually thought it would be a good idea to trudge around the Capitol waving "Trump" flags.

Here are a few of the ways I utilize the great gift of this glorious day.

I thank God for my glorious wifey. I am far from the richest man in the world. That honor might well belong to my friend, Warren Buffett. I am far from the smartest person in the world. That might be Phil DeMuth, my best friend and colleague in some of my books.

I am very, very far from being the handsomest man on the planet. I guess that would be Warren Beatty. I am nowhere near the bravest man on the earth. That would be my classmate at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, Maryland, Tom Norris. He was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor for unimaginably courageous acts against the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese in the Vietnam War and now is my neighbor in North Idaho. There, his incredible courage in fighting the local ultraviolent neo-Nazis was decisive.

But I am the most blessed man on the planet because I am married to my wife. She is the absolutely kindest, most forgiving, most empathetic, most beautiful, most intelligent human being I have ever known.

In a world in which the normal human is avaricious, envious, mean-spirited, and unforgiving, my wife is a saint of kindness and everything else good.

I can and do spend a large part of every day thanking God for her. To think that I, a person of ordinary nothingness, has been married to the same saint for 53 years is worth endless thanks to God.

I pray endlessly. I give thanks to God for allowing me to be born and to live all these years in the most spectacular nation on earth, the United States of America. I am a Jew. All, 100 percent, of my ancestors were Jews. In the lands we came from, we were despised, tortured, shunned, spat on, and murdered in huge numbers for being born Jewish.

In America, with some slight variances, we are treated as equals. Yes, there is some discrimination in schools, in country clubs, and in housing. But by and large, we are treated as equals under the law. That is a miracle of biblical proportions.

I swim almost every day under a blue sky and immense palm trees. I spend hours each day thanking the Lord God for allowing me this gift.

My wife is an invalid. I do all of the shopping in our household for food. Usually, I shop at a supermarket near me called Pavilions. It’s part of an immense chain but I don’t know its name and I don’t care. The abundance of food is amazing.

In every other age of history, there was a shortage of food. In our era, in this glorious country, most of us have more than enough to eat. Let us be thankful for it. Let us bow our heads when we go down the fresh fish aisle and thank the Almighty for such nourishment.

I have access to the great works of history. I am now reading an astoundingly detailed book about George Washington by a historian named Ron Chernow. I can read that book for months, and then there will be an infinitude of other great books to read.

That, by itself, is a gift from God and I am grateful and spend part of the day in prayers of thanks for the pleasure of learning history.

I have air-conditioning. I also enjoy indoor plumbing, XM Radio, which plays all of the great songs from my youth all night and day, and every other modern convenience I should have. That, too, is a gift.

I used to have complete political free speech. I don’t have that now, but I am grateful for having spent most of my life having it. I am in prayers of gratitude for the past and for the future, which, I hope, will be brighter.

Let’s be grateful and thank God for what we have. A day spent in prayer is a great day.

Ben Stein is a writer, an actor, and a lawyer who served as a speechwriter in the Nixon administration as the Watergate scandal unfolded. He began his unlikely road to stardom when director John Hughes cast him as the numbingly dull economics teacher in the urban comedy, "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." Read Ben Stein's Reports — More Here.

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