Thankful Thursday with Rebecca Jo....

I am joining Rebecca Jo at Knit by God's Hand for Thankful Thursday.  

Link up and join in!!

Tuesday night I attended a meeting of our local Society of Human Resource Managers chapter.  It is a good group of colleagues and I always enjoy the speakers and relevant topics.  J. Lenora Bresler is a powerhouse speaker who lives right here in Lakeland. She is a past president of our group and is known nationally as a leadership trainer, as well as being a published author. This picture is from her website.

I was THANKFUL to have been in attendance Tuesday night.  Her topic was diversity, which she says is not the current buzzword we should be using.  Now the word is INCLUSIVE.  She began her talk with a passage from Luke 15:11.  Most of you will recognize this as The Parable of the Prodigal Son.  She said that at a conference of Evangelical preachers, they were asked: "....why did the son end up feeding pigs?"  She asked us, at each table, to answer the same question.  Our table decided it was because he squandered his money and it was his own fault.

At that conference, the American preachers answered the same way we did - it was his own fault that he squandered all of his money (individualized).  A group of preachers from Tanzania answered that famine was the cause (natural causes he could not control), while a group of Russian preachers answered that it was man's inhumanity to man (a more socialistic view).

Her point was that everything we do and think is affected by our culture. The rest of her talk was about human resource managers pulling workers together so that everyone is made to feel included.  The key to inclusion is to utilize everyone's differences. I could have listened to her for another hour, it was that interesting.  If you are interested (and not bored by now) she directed us to this website on Cultural Intelligence.

Last night, we invited one of my coworkers to go out for Thai food with us.  He is a young man who is extremely creative and talented. We are so happy for him that he just bought his first house. He loves Thai and Vietnamese food and is the one who told us about Thai Oishi and how good it is.

We enjoyed spring rolls, a roll of sushi and then we each had a different main course.  All delicious. We spent a lot of time talking about hot peppers and some of our encounters with them!!  This brought on lots of good laughs and what the best remedies are for a burning mouth (milk).

I am THANKFUL for friendships at work. It is such a blessing to have good people in our lives. All of us aren't in this picture, but our dinner guest is the young man in the bottom right-hand corner.  We are old enough to be his grandparents, but we sure enjoyed spending part of our evening with him.

Thanks so much for your visit!  Happy Friday Eve!  Peace & hugs.