Happy Thanksgiving! This season of thankfulness is such a joy! Reflecting on the many things for which I have to be thankful leaves me feeling so very full. God is indeed very good to us.
This concentrated season of thankfulness leaves me feeling a bit convicted, though, that I don't incorporate more of it into my daily life. I suspect that many of us are like that. When we were experiencing such drought this summer and then were blessed with that first, sweet rain, I searched the web for a prayer in thanksgiving for rain. What I found instead were tons and tons of formal and beautiful prayers for rain. . . and not a single one thanking God once the rain had come.
Sometimes I feel too much like that -- like I'm very prayerful in my requests and then silent when I ought to be offering thanks for the answers to those prayers.
I've heard a lot about thankfulness journals. I think they're a great idea. I've even tried to incorporate them myself, but it just didn't take. I have had some success with a thankfulness notecard. I use a notecard system for my daily prayer time, so this integrated nicely. It's super easy, but it does cause me to reflect on thankfulness in an intentional way at least once a day.
All I do is mark the date followed by a 2 or 3 word description of something I'm thankful for. Some examples from this card:
9/25 Shep's birth
10/9 PR
10/9 a friend
10/17 a moment with "Girl 1"
10/25 fixed car
So simple, huh? Anyone can take that much time for thankfulness.
For my monthly giveaway, though, I'm offering you the opportunity to start a nice thankfulness journal. This paperback Moleskine journal has lots of empty pages, just waiting to be filled. (Don't you just love the possibility of an empty journal?!)
All you have to do to be entered into this month's drawing is comment on this post by Saturday, telling me something that you're thankful for. But, you cannot post something that someone else has already posted. So, if you're thankful for your husband, your children, your God, etc., you'd better comment quickly before someone else steals your idea!