Friday, September 2, 2011

Gratitude

On my quest to better myself I started a gratitude journal yesterday. A gratitude journal is just a notebook  (or an ipad app if you're permanently glued to your ipad like me) where you write down all the little things that you're grateful for each day. It's a nice way to help you focus on the all the good things in life. Sometimes I get so bogged down with life that I forget to stop an enjoy it. I think a gratitude journal will help me remember to enjoy it.

It's actually really helped me see the positive side of every situation. This morning I woke up with a horrible headache and instead of focusing on the headache I took a minute to write in my gratitude journal how grateful I am for Tylenol. I paid the bills yesterday and instead of grumbling because I hate paying the bills I wrote how grateful I am that we have the money to pay the bills. There was a time in our marriage where that wasn't so easy. Some other random entries in my gratitude journal over the past two days:

I'm grateful for the birds in my tree. Watching them makes me happy.
I'm grateful for Josh happily unloading the dishwasher without complaining.
I'm grateful for the phone call I received from a friend.
I'm grateful for Shawn for a million reasons.

One of my favorite books is The Hiding Place by Corrie Ten Boom. When I think about gratitude I think of Corrie Ten Boom because she was such a great example of being grateful no matter what your circumstances. If you've never read the book it's the true story of a Christian woman who was put in a concentration camp during WWII because she helped hide Jewish people in her house and how she relied on her faith in God to get through such a horrible experience. I've read that book a million times and I never get tired of it. There is one part where she talks about how they housed many women in a room with straw mattresses that were covered in fleas. It was a terrible situation where the woman were just covered in flea bites. But because of the fleas the guards didn't like to go back to that area and the women were able to secretly have Bible study without getting caught. She talked about how grateful she was for those fleas and that has always stuck with me. If she can be grateful for fleas in a concentration camp the rest of us have nothing to complain about!

So today I'm grateful for Corrie Ten Boom's example and I'm grateful for my gratitude journal because it's helping me remember to focus on the positive things in life. The more I write the more I realize how much I have to be grateful for.

1 comment:

Dustin, Darci, Britton, Benjamin, & Caden said...

I started a gratitude list too. I was just listing 5 things a day. I've been lazy about it lately but you make me want to start it again. I'll have to check out that book too. It sounds great. Thanks!