I am always planning the next step. If I have 10 weddings booked, I’m thinking about where #11 will come from. If I’m happily watching tv with my daughters, I’m figuring out what time I need to start cooking dinner. If I’m eating dinner, I’m planning what I’ll have for dessert. It’s not good. I miss out on the present when I’m always looking for the future. Some planning ahead is certainly necessary and responsible. I live with (and love) a major procrastinator. So the trick is finding the middle ground. On living fully with what I’ve been given in this moment.
The popular book One Thousand Gifts, by Ann Voskamp is beautiful; she is a poet. The way she weaves her words and the stories of her life with God’s word is art. I am reading it for a ministry I’m involved in at my church and I am so glad it was handed to me. I have a feeling I’ll read it again and again. I’ve dogeared so many pages that it’s hard to find the ones that aren’t. Ann’s life was scarred by a traumatic event that made her life both difficult and sorrowful. Through the hope she sees in her brother-in-law, she begins pursuing the belief that joy is found in God. Not just in the perfect, sunny, happy-go-lucky times, but even in the “hard.” She begins a gratefulness journal. Believing that in thankfulness, deep thankfulness she calls eucharisteo, is the joy she desires. This joy is the way to live fully. In her journal are simple things like “suds….all color in sun,” “curls of mozzerella and cheddar piled high in a pond of golden day,””clean sheets smelling like wind,” “child sobs ebbing,” “toppling closets (books!),”toys all over the floors,” two-month-old paint tape around trim (someday soon!)”
Gratefulness isn’t a problem I have, generally. I pray thanks hourly for little things- not rear-ending the car in front of me, finding a parking place in a busy lot, my baby falling back asleep after a late night fuss. But I do NOT find myself grateful that my husband has procrastinated, that my children make messes over and over, that I’m having to pay more money to fix another problem in my house, that a loved one can’t get a job they want, that a friend can’t seem to have a baby. I can’t articulate with the beauty that Voskamp does why we should find eucharisteo even in these harder times, but I know that the practice of it and the pursuit of it was transforming to her heart, mind and life.
So, I am beginning a gratefulness journal. It won’t be jotted down in my fumbling words in a journal somewhere. Somewhere I could forget and leave behind after a few weeks. It will be on this very blog. In living color. My goal is to post a picture once a week of one of these small or large, beautiful or hard details I’m grateful for. To kick it off, on this first week of a fresh year filled with promise, here is what I’m grateful for…
1. I serve a God who loves color
2. my grandfather
