20 Days of Gratitude: Day 5

From November 6 until Thanksgiving, I'll be posting everyday, talking about someone or something I'm grateful for. I invite you to participate along with me. If you have a blog and will be participating, send me the link and I'll link back here. If you don't have a blog and there is a blessing you want to talk about, email me and I'll post it along with my daily blessing. I can even post it anonymously, if you'd prefer. There's something very powerful about focusing on what's right in our lives, and I intend to live this way, walking on the path of gratitude.

Day Five:

Miss A and her best buddy Little Man E

I am so grateful for the friends I have in my life.  Last night, with husbands at home putting babies to bed, a good friend and I curled up on sofas at a local coffee shop to talk.  Pouring our hearts out over icey cups of cream soda, we shared our struggles, triumphs, concerns from the last few weeks.  There's something so magical about times like this, times when you are free, open to share everything as it comes, to open the floodgates and let the emotion lap up like waves on the shore.  I don't take for granted that we can do this, that we can trust our husbands to get the babies tucked in for the night, drive our cars across town, pay for our drinks, sit for hours and talk about nothing and everything.  Given that, it's not just the time I had with her for which I'm grateful...it's the safe arms I left my daughter in when I left home, the car that didn't fail me, the dollar bills that paid for my soda, the relationship I find myself in with this beautiful woman of God.

I have always pictured gratitude as this one simple thing, like a single stroke of a wide brush on a canvas.  What I'm learning, day by day, is that gratitude is more like a woven tapestry, each thread interconnected and dependent on the next to create the image of beauty.  To be thankful for the one thing, to truly be grateful, I experience gratitude for the many layers preceding it and the many that come after it. 

At times my tapestry has been threadbare, woven thin from my failure to recognize the blessings that surround me.  My hope is that as I spend my days this month focusing on those things, the little and big, that my tapestry will be repaired, brought to new shimmering beauty before the Lord, that my thanksgiving will glorify the One from whom all blessings flow. 

Praise God, from Whom all blessings flow;

Praise Him, all creatures here below;

Praise Him above, ye heavenly host;

Praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.