…more on the wonderful way gratitude can change a life…from irritable, to thankful and joyful–and even from carrying extra weight on my body to releasing even the extra weight…
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Another way God has used the intentional practice of gratitude in my life is to pull the focus off of self. This, too, feeds the power funneled to fight against habitual sin. But by pulling the focus off of me, my wants, my body, my food, my rights, my this, my that, I am freed up to focus on God. He alone is worthy of that much focus! He is worthy of being magnified! I can’t make him too big. The fact is, even though it may seem remote to me at times…he IS good. No matter what may come my way, that TRUTH won’t change. By choosing to focus on HIM and not on my SELF, it puts everything into perspective.
Gratitude transformed our family vacation–and our family! As I mentioned previously…but this is a bit more about that…I hate going out of town. I don’t like to be gone long. I don’t like to go anywhere else and I don’t want to be away from home. I don’t like the traveling process, PERIOD. So, when my husband planned for our family to go to the East Coast for EIGHT days–our longest family vacation ever…AND the farthest away from home we would all have ever been–I was NOT very excited. (This is an understatement.)
But the cool thing is, we all chose to look for things to thank and praise God for during our trip. We did so frequently and some times earnestly…typically in response to something appearing not to be going our way…LOL! For instance, when my husband insisted in his perky positive way (why is he NEVER like that at home? LOL!) that we would do the DC Death March…the other three of us had head colds…OOOoooh it was painful! But we managed to praise God…and you know what? The next day when we were heading back into DC and got caught in a LOOOOONG traffic jam we could praise God that we had seen SO much of Washington DC the previous day since it was clear we weren’t going to get to see much of it on day 2!
In fact, on day 8 as we were coming back from the airport in our car heading home…(we live in California, so that tells you something about how long of a day it had been)…we were all excitedly talking about the NEXT family vacation! Can you believe it? The two days following our trip, we sat down to add entries of things we were grateful for from our trip to our online gratitude blog (which is in need of being updated now…). Click here and here to see those entries.
We truly felt like God blessed us so much! We could have gone on with more “normal” things to praise God for on our trip…like the fact that tons and tons of metal stayed in the air…who would ever think that an *airplane* would fly? LOL!
Tomorrow, I will share HOW to foster a heart of gratitude. 🙂
