Cultivating Gratitude

Recently a friend and mentor of mine shared with me about a book she is reading called One Thousand Gifts.  The author, recognizing her ungrateful heart and attitude toward life (boy, did that description pluck a convicting heart string!) set out to create a list of one thousand things for which she was grateful.  One Thousand.  That's a mighty long list.

As I listened to Sheri share about this book and a bit of the author's experience of experiencing God in the present, I became inspired to challenge myself to do likewise.   

Ungrateful heart?  Complaining and grumbling spirit?  Guilty, guilty, and guilty.  Grandpa Adam, Grandma Eve, I'm lookin' at you.  It's been there since the beginning.  Do you think my first word was "mine" or "thanks"? 

And so I put my hands to the plow and begin the work of cultivating gratitude.  I'm not talking about breaking up soil that's simply been lying fallow for a few years.  Not a chance.  This will be a brand new territory--laboring to clear a patch of land overrun and entangled with thorns and weeds of sin. And through disciplined care and the work of the Holy Spirit hoping that it will produce the desired fruit of gratitude.

A gardener is diligent in his work, is he not?  Daily uprooting weeds that spring up overnight, watering and tending to planted seeds, adding nutrients to the soil, and the list goes on.  Yet, for all his diligence and labor he really has no ability to force a shoot to emerge from a seed, cause the growth, or tell the plant the proper time for bearing its fruit. 

So I imagine it will be with gratitude.  Daily uprooting ingratitude that sneaks in and tries to choke out my little gratitude plants. And watering the roots with practiced gratitude so that what was planted becomes firmly established in my heart.

And so I embark on my own journey of opening my eyes and looking at my daily life to see one thousand things for which I am able to genuinely give thanks to God.  I imagine you'll see some of them appear in posts from time to time.

Someone finally did it!

I was pretty skeptical when a colleague mentioned, "here's a great video on poverty".  I feel like all of those videos raising awareness about any sort of societal issue are the same...shocking pictures, emotional music, and at the end I'm left feeling guilty or heartless.
This involves none of those elements.  After I watched it I just wanted to stand up and cheer.  It is like getting a halftime locker room talk from a coach and finding out for the first time that we actually have a good chance of winning the game.
So take a coffee break, sit back and be encouraged.  And be careful with your coffee in case you start excitedly swinging your arm around in a cheering gesture.

 

Heart Surgery

Recent months are some of the more painful in my short-ish life.  It wasn't one particular circumstance, more like back to back to back to back to back situations where the floor seemed to drop out from beneath me. 

It's the sort of season that will rock a girl to the core and leave her with just the core, which is probably the whole point of it all to begin with. I liken it to heart surgery.  Not my physical heart.  I mean heart as in the center of who I am. 

There's a passage in the book of Hebrews that I really love.  The first part of it goes like this:  

"Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us,"  -Hebrews 12:1 (ESV, emphasis mine)

I feel like in this season God mercifully lifted weights from me to help me press even harder into this race of life before me.  The weights He lifted weren't inherently bad things at all:  dreams, goals, relationships, even financial security.  Having those things lifted (which felt like having them taken away at the time) hurt like crazy. 

It didn't take long before God clued me in to what He was doing.  Then I saw the tender mercy in the action of Him lifting the weights that I couldn't see or simply wasn't strong enough to lay aside on my own.  And it still hurt like crazy, just to be authentic with  you.  But I had the sweet comfort of His care and nearness in it all.

I learned that each weight He lifted from me had deep roots in my heart.  But the weights weren't taken from me recklessly like weeds from a garden with all the ripping and tearing. Instead they were skillfully removed with great precision by the very Surgeon who created my heart.

Surgery hurts, but the purposeful wounds of a surgeon can be trusted.  We willingly submit ourselves to it because we know that it will help us, right? 

So that's where I've been for the past couple of months -- letting God do a bit of radical heart surgery and trying not to get in His way during the healing process. 

 

Litter-ally

One of my neighbors has an obnoxious habit of throwing his cigarette butts and empty packs on the ground. Occasionally, in what I sincerely believe is a twisted effort to pick up after himself, he tosses the empty packs behind the bushes. There they become invisible to the whole world...unless, of course, anyone happens to be looking out my windows at my striking bushfront view. It's tricky to get to the litter behind the bushes due to the spiky foliage, dog waste in the garden in front of the bushes...shockingly due to the same neighbor, and the bee's nest. What I really need is one of those old man pick-em, poke-em reacher sticks to give me some extra arm length.
This morning I opened the blinds with a, "You've got to be kidding me," as I saw the above combination of litter. That's right. An empty pack of smokes and an inhaler. It's a dark sort of irony that brings a head shake of disbelief more than a laugh.

Proudly flying the flag of the 20th century

Recently the cable guy came by my door trying to sell me any and all services that his company has to offer that I don't currently have.
"I see that you have internet with us. How is it working for you?"
"Fine."
"Do you have a satellite dish? What do you use for tv? You know we can save you money if you bundle your cable with your internet."
"I have an antenna."
(slight choking sound) "An antenna? Interesting..."
"Yeah, it's free. You see it right there in the window, Ahfaz? It looks like a giant pair of rabbit ears on top of my tv. Now take a good look at that silver flag on one ear. You think that's there for decoration? No way. That's aluminum foil and it helps reel in some extra signal. Now if you ever walk by and it's been replaced by a white flag of surrender, then you can come back and sell me your expensive cable in a bundle. Hey, listen, I'd show you my covered wagon, too, but it's in the shop."

Fa la-la-la-la!

A one minute cup of cheer to celebrate the spirit of the season.

Kid Conversations

As it turns out, some of the youngsters in my neighborhood are budding conversationalists. One of my favorites is a 3 year old I see often at the dog park. We recently had a chat that went like this:
"Hey, B. I'm going to go home now. I need to feed the dog and eat dinner."
"But she just ate that stick."
"Well, I think she needs some dog food, too."
"Oh. What are you going to eat for dinner?"
"Leftovers, I think."
"What is a leftover?"
"It is extra food from my dinner last night that is in my refrigerator."
"Oh. What color is your refrigerator?"
"White."
"I think all refrigerators are white."

And then there was the elementary schooler on roller blades that stopped me yesterday:
"Hey! What kind of dog is that?"
"She's part Australian Shepherd."
"There's another one of those here, but it's going blind. Did you know that there is a man with the world record for having no nostrils? He looks like this..."
Oh, to be a fly on the wall for his first date.

The times they are a changin'...

Tonight on a Dallas freeway I spotted a car with personalized plates that said, GAIA....personalized plates for Mother Earth.
Hmmm, so this is what she's driving these days....

I never really pictured myself being passed by Mother Earth on a freeway, but if I did, I think I'd expect something more like this:

I don't know. With her shiny new Vette, it kind of makes me wonder if the ole girl's on the take and sold out to special interest groups...if no one renews that vanity plate I'm going to get it and put it on a jacked-up big wheel truck with a roll bar and dual snorkel exhaust.

Love in the check-out line

Each week I look forward to my brief exchange with the guy that bags my groceries at the local Kroger. He's a middle-aged African American man who never meets a stranger and doesn't let anyone leave his line without a smile. I don't know what his first name is, only that his last name is Love...or at least that's what he claims.
Yesterday he happened to be in the parking lot as I was loading my car and he volunteered to finish the job for me. While doing so, he some life philosophy with me, which I am now passing along to you. This guy cracks me up.

What Women Really Want -by Johnny Love

"All the young guys around here tell me they know what women want. But they don't know the first thing about women. You see, what a woman really wants is for you to shut-up and do what she asks you to do. She wants you to hold down a job and move out chyo' momma's house. That's what a woman wants. That's what I tell these boys."

Why my dog hates Jack London books

On one long road trip I listened to a couple of Jack London books on cd. I could swear Hannah was giving me the stink eye every time the story mentioned the sled dogs burrowing into the snow for the night. Call of the Wild? I think not. Shoot, if I don't get to bed early enough, I have to poke White Fang here off of the prime real estate.

If I Ran The Zoo

I finally made my big move to Dallas and moving into the new apartment has been a joyful project. For the better part of a year my adult life sat in a storage unit in Amarillo, packed away like some enormous game of Jenga. But now I get to be in that fun stage where I'm taking all of my Jenga pieces and the new apartment and figuring out how to make it feel like a home.

Sometimes during my little homemaking projects I realize that I need a tool that I don't have. Don't be misled, here. I'm talking putting together a Walmart desk and realizing I need a Phillip's screwdriver not a tile cutter, okay? So lately I've been making visits to The Home Depot. And every time I'm there I can't help but think that if I owned that store I'd start selling cold beer and I'd put it right over there next to all of that fancy pants patio furniture.

Also, I'd nix the whole orange uniform thing. I know it matches the logo, but I bet employee morale will skyrocket if people don't look like The Great Pumpkin every minute on their time card. But what do I know? I went to college and studied dirt.

Janet rides shotgun

I'm on a bit of an adventure these days--taking a leap of faith and following what I believe to be God's leading to move my support-raising efforts to Dallas although I know very few people here.
Last week I packed my bag, set the course on the GPS on my new phone and journeyed out of the Panhandle.
I've never driven with a GPS system before, but figured that I should take advantage of the resources available to me with this new piece of technology. Now that it's 2011, I may as well jump into 2008, right? No one drives around with printed-out Mapquest directions anymore. And who would be caught dead with an actual folding map?! I mean, what am I driving these days anyway? A covered wagon?
Within minutes a voice started squawking from my console telling me to, "turn right in 1/4 mile. TURN RIGHT....recalculating....turn right in 1 mile....TURN RIGHT," Obviously the GPS girl didn't know about the cutoff highway and was going to send me 30 minutes out of my way just for the fun of it. After I ignored her for long enough, I think she just gave up on me. Pretty sure that when she said, "Signal lost," it was her GPS equivalent of, "I'm sorry, I'm washing my hair tonight."
She started speaking to me again when my route met up with hers. That's about the time I named that girl Janet. "You gotta have a little faith in me, Janet. I know where I'm going."
After 200 miles of driving on the same highway, it was finally time for the BIG interchange. It was dark, but thankfully Janet started her yapping while I was on the phone, so I heard neither Janet nor the person on the phone. I ended the call and saw flashing emergency vehicle lights right about where the exit should be. "Exit right in 1/4 mile...Exit right. EXIT RIGHT!"
I held the phone up to the window as we passed so Janet could see that the ramp was closed and would get off my back about the whole thing.
But that Janet gives up so easily! All of a sudden she had the route recalculated and decided we were going to take a much longer and more inconvenient way to our final destination when all we really had to do was find a good place to make a U-turn.
I make my U-turn, but that really made Janet mad. "In 1/4 mile make a U-turn....Make a U-turn, Make a U-turn, Make a U-tuuuurn!!" I'm pretty sure I heard her sigh with exasperation before saying, "In one mile, make a U-turn..."
At which point I yell back in my own exasperation, "Damn it, Janet! You've GOT to have some faith in me! I know what I'm doing here. Pipe down."
And as we approached the entrance ramp to the highway we were originally going to take, Janet quietly acknowledged that I was right. "Exit right onto 380 East..."
"I told you so."
Technology is great. Fighting with Janet, even though I'm talking to a piece of plastic, is far more satisfying at the end of the day than fighting with paper maps in the olden days. Because, let's face it, that was a losing battle for us girls from the get-go. At least with Janet I can fall back on the threat, "If you don't knock it off I'll drop you in a glass of water. I have unconditional insurance on you. Don't think I won't do it." This, of course, is the single woman's version of Dad's, "Don't you make me come back there!" while paddling at the kids in the back seat with his right hand and driving with the left.
But just like the kids, Janet knows I won't really do it. I want my text messages too badly.