LIFE HAPPENS…
sometimes it’s exciting and new and other times life hard. Just Plain. Hard. And then other days it’s mundane. There are dishes to be done. Mom can you find my other boot. The dog did what? And the list goes on and on.
Ok so the dog thing probably lands in the exciting category.
I have no recollection when gratitude became such a HUGE part of my everyday life, but when it did something happened….I changed.
Transformation
I was angry and unhappy. For many reasons, some perhaps we will get into in the near future. Gratitude took my eyes off of me and my own struggles and placed them on the one who had blessed me beyond belief.
Whether it was the exciting,, the mundane or the hard….OR the just down right extraordinary I discovered I found a new sense of joy in the middle of it all. AND the really amazing thing was as I began to make gratitude a daily practice I began to take notice of these little tiny things. It became a game to see just how many I could write down in my little notebook a day.
Have I ever mentioned I am a highly competitive person? Maybe my hubby can share just how ruthless I can bee playing Phase 10….JK don’t ask!
I find joy in the weird little things. AND I have realized that some people don’t know how to handle me. My joy is often misunderstood. And I chuckle. WHY? Because people aren’t use to that kind of joy. We are so programmed to think about the negative.
Perspective
People complain A LOT. I can complain A LOT. Sometimes life is hard and that is all we can see. That is why I started choosing gratitude over the anger. I just couldn’t handle that lifestyle anymore. I put my energy into a different direction. it really is about perspective and focus.
That’s part of the reason I can laugh at myself for setting off an IV pump 9,345 times in a 3 hour span….(pssst it really wasn’t that many times but I am sure the 3 nurses who took turns resetting the thing felt like it was). I am so grateful, so so so grateful that I can go sit in a chair for 3 hours and get antibodies that keep me healthy so I can take care of my family and be a part of church. I am so very grateful both to the nurses and for the nurses. God gave them a special kind of patience!, care and love.
The challenge
So no matter what kind of day you are having, start by choosing 3 things you are grateful for. If you choose 3 things a day to be grateful for you will have 1,095 things that you can count as blessings by the end of the year.
As a side note I am thankful for coffee 365 days out of the year. No one says you can’t choose something to be grateful for more than once!
Life is all sorts of craziness and everyday that God gives us breath is one more reason to be grateful. Don’t believe me wait til next week!
How about you? in whatever season of life you are in right now what are you thankful for?
Birds chirping is top of my list. Along with warmer days, sunshine and farmers!
Don’t quite know where to start Check out Ann Voskamp’s Joy Dare.
You can also check out my Joy Dare Challenge from last year where I used her prompts!
So I am not going to lie. This week was UNEXPECTED!!!! The last thing on my mind was spending an extra week at camp. BUT the kids and I are here We were handed a detour for at least part of this week. so here I sit at my computer, the kids are resting in our camper (we just finished a pontoon boat ride around the lake) and I am sitting here at our rest stop on this detour. But in all honesty it took both hubby and I awhile to get to this stop on the detour.
