Swing by the T/A truck stop off I-75 in Jackson, Georgia, and you’ll see a food court, gas pumps and rows of big rigs in the parking lot.

But then a peaceful song catches your ear and you follow it to a bright neon cross and a tractor trailer with “Truckers Chapel” in big letters across the side. Open the door and you see a dozen or so truckers from all over the country, filling the air with hymns.

A church at a truck stop? Actually, it’s more common than you might think. But only because I ran into trouble back when I was a trucker myself.

I’d been driving a big rig for three years, and I could make runs from my hometown of Dublin, Georgia, to just about anywhere without a map. But inside, I felt lost. Those long days and nights on the road were lonely. Sometimes I could barely keep my eyes open.

One night a fellow trucker offered me some pills to stay awake. I didn’t say no. The pills put me on edge. I worked even longer hours, grew distant from my wife, Jan, and our young son.

One night I blacked out at the wheel. The truck ran off the road, tipped onto its side and skidded into a ditch. The load spilled out of the trailer. Amazingly, I wasn’t hurt. But I was suspended for two weeks.

It was a wakeup call. As soon as I returned home from my first run after the accident, I went to a local Baptist church for the first time in years. I thought someone told the pastor I was coming because every word of his sermon hit home. I had been neglecting my family, my friends, even my own health. Finally, the pastor came down from the pulpit. “I’m meeting you halfway,” he said. “Will you travel the rest?” I stood up and met him at the altar.

From then on, I would find a church on the road and go to a Bible study at home. Praying with others gave me a bigger boost than any pills ever could. The hardest thing was finding a church in a strange city. And there was rarely room to park my big rig.

After I quit running over the road and started running more locally, I got the idea to start a Bible study at a big truck stop in Atlanta. My wife loved the idea. I called the manager of the T/A stop in Atlanta, expecting him to laugh, but he offered up some space.

That first meeting, about a dozen people showed up. One guy didn’t say a single word until the very end, when he came up to me. “I was running low, Chaplain Joe,” he said. “You filled up my tank.”

“How ’bout Texas?” “Got anything out in California?” The requests for chapels at more truck stops kept coming in. I called truck stops and found local ministers to lead the services, and I bought Bibles by the case and gave them out to drivers.

Two trucking companies even offered to pay my salary—to quit trucking and serve as the president of Truckstop Ministries. In many of the locations, we set up converted tractor trailers so that drivers will have a place to worship together whenever they stop by.

Today, Truckstop Ministries has 500 workers in 77 locations nationwide. Our rigs aren’t the only things that need refueling. Our spirits do too.

Every year when Thanksgiving comes around, I remember gratefully a bit of wisdom handed to me when I was a young man. Having some stubborn difficulties in my life, I took them to an older and respected friend. “Why is it,” I complained, “that I can’t seem to cope with these problems?”

I remember his long, thoughtful glance. “Maybe,” he said, “it’s because you aren’t grateful enough.”

“Grateful?” I was astonished. “What are you talking about?”

“I’m talking,” he said, “about a law of living that you will discover someday. Focus on adversities, as you’re doing, and you’ll attract more of them. Be grateful for the privilege of living, and your life will grow increasingly bright. My advice to you is to be less of a complainer and more of a thanksgiver. Your troubles will become a lot more manageable, I promise you.”

Half a century of observing life and people has left me convinced that what my friend said that day is profoundly true: In some unfathomable way, the acknowledgment of past blessings seems to be the activator of blessings.

Over and over again I have seen the attitude of gratitude bring about extraordinary changes in people’s lives. I once knew a man—William Stidger—who suffered a shattering emotional breakdown. For months he was profoundly depressed, unable to work. No doctors seemed to be able to help him, but one day a friend challenged him to try what he called the therapy of thankfulness. “Many people have helped you in your life,” the friend said. “Pick any one of them—I dare you—and simply thank him.”

Pondering this, Bill Stidger recalled a schoolteacher, long retired, who years before had awakened in him an appreciation of poetry. He made himself write a short note, telling her what that act had meant to him. Soon a reply came back in the tremulous handwriting of an old lady. “When I read your letter,” it said, “my eyes were blinded with tears. Yours is the first letter of thanks I ever received from one of my students. I shall cherish it always.”

Bill Stidger wrote a note of appreciation to another person, and then another, until he had written over 500 such letters. By then, fully recovered, he was back at work. But he kept copies of those letters and the replies and in later years, whenever depression threatened him, he would reread some of them and let the therapy of thankfulness do its work.

Why is gratitude strengthening? Because it recharges the soul. Anyone who is grateful is focusing on what is good, and ultimately all good things come from God. This means that the thankful person is aligning himself with the most powerful force in the universe and is drawing strength from it.

Feeling thankful connects a person with a great spiritual dynamo, but before the power can begin to flow a second step must be taken: The gratitude you feel must be expressed. In a vivid scene in the New Testament, St. Luke tells how Christ once healed ten lepers. Of the ten, only one came back to express thanks. “But where are the nine?” asked Jesus. No one answered, but in that echoing silence every person present must have known that something was wrong, something was missing, some deep circuit was incomplete.

And so if at any time you feel a blast of appreciation or a sudden surge of gratitude, translate it into action. Write that note, make that phone call, send that small gift or flower. Act as if the impulse to act were a divine command.

When a group of people feel and express gratitude together, enormous power can come crashing through. A number of years ago Nikita Khrushchev, the formidable premier of the Soviet Union, visited this country. The mayor of New York gave a luncheon for him, and I was invited to attend. At Khrushchev’s entrance, the Soviet national anthem was played, and we all stood respectfully. We continued to stand as the orchestra played “The Star-Spangled Banner.” A bar or two went by; then somewhere in the vast crowd a little man started to sing the words. He had a thin, quavering voice, he sounded lonely and a bit foolish, but he continued to sing. Then another voice picked it up, and another, until suddenly with a great roar of sound everyone was singing. All the love, all the pride, all the gratitude we felt for this wonderful land came pouring through.

It is this healing power that we Americans seek and sense on Thanksgiving Day, something so beneficent that it’s like the touch of a great kindly hand on the fevered brow of the nation. You can’t measure or analyze it. It’s simply there, invisible, intangible, a glow of gratitude, an aura of thankfulness that strengthens us all, and strengthens our nation, too, because when you focus on the best in something, you want to preserve and defend it.

How can we maintain this attitude not just on Thanksgiving but on every other day? One way is to try to be more aware of the mystery and magic of life.

A simple device that I often use to heighten my sense of appreciation is one that I call my last-time technique. “Suppose,” I say to myself when I’m doing something particularly enjoyable or worthwhile, “suppose this were the last time you could see a sunset, or hear great music, or smell lilac or honeysuckle, or touch a loved one’s hand.” Just a mental trick, of course. But it seems to work.

It’s a step that each of us needs to take, because it completes a circle based on a profound yet simple spiritual law, the law that my wise old friend tried to teach me so many years ago, the law that says you will find what you look for.

In this life, if you steadfastly affirm goodness, goodness will be there. If you affirm love, you will find it. And if you affirm thankfulness, blessings will flow.

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Today’s guest blogger is assistant editor Daniel Kessel.

Have you ever noticed how certain smells bring up vivid memories from the past?

It’s a widely studied topic. According to Brown University neuroscientist Rachel Herz, the same part of the brain that forms new memories is also responsible for registering smell–that’s why the link between scents, emotions and memories is so strong.  But as I recently learned, there may be more to this phenomenon than science alone can explain.

Last Tuesday after work, I pushed my way into a crowded subway car, tired from the busy day. I’d left the office around 6 PM, and with my 30-minute commute home ahead of me, I couldn’t wait to get back to my apartment and relax. I put my headphones in and held on as the train moved forward.

Within moments, a strangely familiar smell filled the subway car–a blend of wood, paint and flowers. At first, I couldn’t put my finger on why I recognized it. I looked around, expecting to find the source.

Someone holding a can of paint? A bouquet of roses? Both at the same time? But I saw nothing out of the ordinary. As I took the scent in, though, something clicked–and I felt overwhelmed with the memory of a place I used to live.

It was my first apartment after college, a three-bedroom, second-floor walkup in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. I shared the apartment with my friends Amanda and Joe, plus Joe’s cat, Lady.

The four of us became like a family–Amanda and I both had our first jobs, and Joe was finishing his final year of school. (Lady held down the fort.) We were all “words” people, so almost every weeknight we’d meet back at home, listen to music probably a little too loud and play word games.

That whiff on the subway brought me back. I closed my eyes and remembered the day we first moved into the apartment, when the walls were bare with a fresh coat of white paint and the hardwood floors were clear of furniture.

The aroma in the subway smelled just like our brand-new apartment–wood, paint, and a hint of something floral. We had to give the apartment up once our year-long lease ended, but I still missed living there with Amanda, Joe and of course, Lady.

The next day at work, during my lunch break, I logged into my Facebook account…and was surprised to read the first item on my news feed. “HELLO I MISS YOU JOE,” Amanda had written on Joe’s wall.

She linked to one of the songs Joe used to blast from our apartment’s speakers. Like me, they both missed our place and the good times we’d had there. I quickly “liked” the whole thread and started pitching into the nostalgia with some comments of my own.

I lingered over the post for a moment, reading our comment thread one more time. That’s when I noticed it—the timestamp of Amanda and Joe’s initial conversation: Tuesday at 6:24 PM. The same time I’d been down in the subway, overcome by a smell that reminded me of our Sunset Park home.

How about you? Has a mysterious scent ever jump-started your memory? Or do you have any recollections about a perfect home you’ve lived in? Share your stories with us!