1000 Gifts

My dear friend, Renee, sent me to the most amazing and inspirational blog I have seen in a long while! There is so much for me to read and learn. God is so incredibly real! I had a real deepset heart concern this morning, and I wrote to my friend, asking her advice. She responded and then later this day, she felt compelled to send me a name of a woman that wrote a blog. She didn' really say much about it. I had no clue until I got there that it was exactly what I was looking for. It answered every question and in a beautiful way. God knew that I should write to Renee, and He also knew to have her direct me to this site.

So what is the picture above about? It is about Gratefulness. It is about setting a goal to count 1000 gifts.


This is the another link when Ann explains it more.

As we look around ourselves there are so many things that we take for granted. I know when I first moved to our area and I had four small children and was overwhelmed with building a new house with a husband that lived most of the time 5 hours away - I had a hard time finding things to be grateful for. Oprah Winfrey (who I no longer watch) said at that time to have a Grateful journal. Well, at that time it was hard to find things to be grateful for.

But I tried. And I tried. The list was rather pathetic in those hard days of bears visiting my trailer in the night, knocking over the freezer and stealing food; babies getting sick and boys getting concussions; and no husband there to protect us in the wilderness. It was really hard on those long scary nights all alone. But I did it.

Some of my attempts were these:

The baby didn't wake more than 5 times last night.
I had a warm bath.
I had a cup of nice relaxing tea.
The children played in the sunshine today.

As time went by this list got easier to write and the items got a little less desperate. Writing the list helped me through those days that seemed so dark and hard. There really is something to looking for something to be grateful for.

The 1000 Gifts is looking for things that are everywhere. So I will begin with today:

1) I saw some birds I had never seen before. We watched them for a while to try to identify them. We will have to get out our bird books.

2) We saw a hawk fly down and settle on a fence that was on the edge of our property. We had the privilige of getting so close that we could see its face and hooked beak.

3) There were three young deer, and even one was just a wee fawn. They were walking right by our house! We hope they will stay through the building and bless us with their presense.

4) The sun and sky were a gorgeous shade of red as the sun went down, promising us a warm day tomorrow.

5) The skies were blue and clear of smoke from the forest fires today!

6) What a gift my dear friend Renee is.

7) Finding A Holy Experience.

8) Having my son come home this summer to bless us with helping us to build our house.

9) A family of eight beautiful children and one hardworking, hardloving man.

10) The delicous pumpkin muffins that I made this morning. I was able to bless my hardworking crew with them at the jobsite, after they came from their paid work and went to our job to spend the next four hours building our new home!

I hope you will join me on this 1000 Gifts journey. It is sure to cause our lives to feel so much fuller and richer.
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