Okay so today's Gratitude Attitude might be a little self-indulgent but I am grateful for the gift of administration!  I'm grateful I have it and I'm grateful others do as well.  While other people shudder at the thought of having to engage in admin type tasks and duties, I love it!  I thrive in it.  I love being behind the scenes and relieving someone who isn't jazzed about admin and feels weighed down and held back by it of it. I love being able to take those things off someones plate so they are free to do what they love to do and are best at.  It truly makes me feel grateful for this gift I possess.  How about you?  What gift do you possess that makes you grateful?

My Mama is arriving at the airport in Denver right about now and will soon be boarding a plane that will take her to another plane that will take her to Africa.  I've taken a similar journey.  Perhaps you remember my journeys to Africa, perhaps you are new to me and don't know.  (If that's the case click here  to start my story about Africa.)  Regardless today I find myself "in" Africa in my thoughts and heart.  In fact, lately I've been having dreams about all my beloved friends in Africa in which we are together.  This past Saturday night I got to have some face time with a dear friend from Kenya, whom I will see again next week.  Bits of sunshine.  My Mama couldn't find room in her luggage for me so I'll have to be content with staring at the picture of the carepoint where she will be in Swaziland and fighting back the green-eyed monster that I can't be there.  I'm grateful my Mama gets to visit a continent that has become a part of my heart

Okay so this is one of those Gratitude Attitudes that I'm trying to have a gratitude attitude about.  This morning (um, ahem, yes that would be yesterday - Monday - because I am behind...again...what's new?) we got in the car and started our trek toward school.  I peered to my left and saw a blaze of pink coming up over the horizon.  And it grew and grew until the sky had been taken over by glorious pink and purples turning into oranges and fading into blue sky.  It was magnificent.  And I was stuck in the freaking car trying to sneak peeks of this glorious show while trying to also be a safe driver.  And I fought being grateful for the display and the gorgeous start to my day and being grumpy because I couldn't sit and simply enjoy it. These days I miss every sunrise.  We are already in the car and the day is already on the fast-track.  And honestly? I feel pretty grumpy about it.  I want to watch the day come up in a blaze of glory and beauty but I'm stuck in the car

I'm grateful for cooking.  I'm grateful that I learned how...eventually. :) I'm also grateful that my family seems to like and appreciate my cooking.  When I have the space and time I love to make delicious food that I know will make the taste buds of those I feed it to smile.  I love understanding how things come together to be delicious.  When I don't have time and space I'm a little less grateful for cooking but overall I am so thankful that I like it so much.  Today I spent the day cooking up 14 freezer meals.  If I don't make up freezer meals about once a month then my family is usually resorting to eating popcorn for dinner. :)  This Mama is busy and freezer meals are ensuring they eat something at least 19 evenings out of the month (I also participate in a cook group that makes up 5 freezer meals a month)!  *grin*

Yep, I'm grateful for airplanes today.  No, I'm not on one and aren't going to be on one anytime soon BUT I'm grateful for them as I think about what they have enabled me to do and who they have enabled me to meet in my life so far. Because of airplanes I have been able to travel to states in America and countries across the oceans.  I've been able to see wonders of the world and wonders of my own little world.  I've been able to have face time with people who have known me since birth and meet people who I'm able to have face time with as God allows. I'm grateful for airplanes that have carried me to my nephew and niece and my NYC family and have carried them to Colorado to see me (okay, and the other family members to.  I will share I guess!).  I'm grateful for an airplane that carried me recently to a friend in Seattle that God has gifted me with so unexpectedly many many years ago. I'm thinking about my gratefulness today for airplanes as

Selah.  I'm grateful for selah.  If you are going, "what?!" let me define it for you.  Selah: pause and think on that, interlude, pause.  Got it?  Basically it is a word that says, "Hey *this* is important to stop at and consider and think through or think about.  Rest on *this* for a moment before continuing."  I'm so grateful for selah.  If I didn't have selah moments in my life then I would just speed through without ever noticing anything around me.  Selah gets me to "stop and smell the roses."  I first discovered selah when reading the Psalms in the Bible.  You might have seen it to the side or underneath a verse before continuing on to the next.  It's saying, "whoa, that was important so think about it a little before just moving on."  So I started doing that, with the verses in Psalms and the verses in the Bible overall.  Then I started doing it in my life with moments and relationships and conversations, even with work rel

I kinda love popcorn.  Oh sure I love some of the "gourmet" kinds but at heart I'm a purist.  A little bit of salt and a little bit of butter.  Seriously, no movie popcorn for me - too much butter and salt.  Just a touch is better in my opinion.  It might seem silly to be grateful for popcorn but when my taste buds are grateful then I am too.  I'm grateful for the person that looked at a kernel of corn and either thought, "What would happen if..." or did it by accident and discovered popcorn!  I'm not really concerned with how it came to be just grateful that it did.

Today was full of sunshine.  Not a cloud in my part of the Colorado sky.  I went out at lunch to run an errand and opened up the sunroof on my car and let the sun shine in.  It was incredible.  In fact, so incredible that I was internally kicking and screaming as I dragged myself back inside for the rest of the workday.  :) Here in Colorado we are blessed with a lot of sunshine days, even when it's only 30 degrees.  I am so grateful for our beautiful sunshine days.  They warm my soul.

Today I am very grateful for massage therapy.  Yes, I love the kind meant for pure relaxation but today I am grateful for the kind I am currently getting - medical massage.  Yes there is such a thing and for this wound up chick it is a good thing there is.  I am wound up.  Who knew?  (Rhetorical question - if you know me well this doesn't surprise you that I am.)  I carry all my stress and heartache and frustration in my right shoulder area.  Then it shares and spreads all over my neck muscles and down into my lower back and makes a journey sideways to the left side.  Like I said, I am wound up.  Well sometimes it really bites me and in the past 6 months I could count on one hand the number of days I haven't had a headache.  Clearly something is wrong.  So I finally bit the bullet and got in with a medical massage therapist.  She is going to be REALLY helpful.  I've seen her twice and she kept saying under her breath, "Wow. You are tight."  Yep.  Welcome to me, wo

This intentional gratefulness project is tougher than I thought.  It shouldn't be.  But it is.  In theory being grateful everyday sounds like a "duh moment."  In reality when I can't come up with a single thing to be grateful for something ugly in me is exposed. The ungratefulness I carry in me is exposed.  The entitlement issues I'm guessing I still have are exposed. The "downer debbie" part of me comes to the surface.  The lack of joy and trust in God make an appearance.  I think my struggles with depression  are also exposed when I find it difficult to verbalize even one thing I am grateful for.  I know that one way to combat the mild depression is to exercise gratefulness and when I can't seem to do it that's a red flag in my spirit.  And the truth of the matter is lately I have been struggling with some mild depression again.  If you know me well enough you have seen the signs - the lack of response time to phone calls, texts, FB messages,

I am grateful for hot tea.  It does something for my soul even when I'm not really paying attention to the state of my soul.  Something about tea calms me, soothes me, brings peace.  That may seem silly to you but it's true for me.  I'm also grateful that it is an affordable way to take care of myself.  What's something that helps you settle down in your soul?

No, not those kind of collisions.  ( That would take some serious sugar to make lemonade from that kind of collision! )  I'm grateful for the collision between my world and the world of others.  Like when my first world life collides with that of the third world life I have been honored to travel to.  The collision of those two worlds have literally changed my life.  I don't have the adequate words to describe my gratefulness for that collision.  Or the collision of God's grace with my weakness.  That has also been a life changing event.  What kind of collisions have happened in your life that you are grateful for?

I'm grateful for opportunities to volunteer for a variety of events and people.  I'm grateful because for the time I am engaged in the volunteer activity I am not focused on me.  Let's face it, so much of our time is focused on us.  I'm not saying it's all bad but I don't know about you but I sure do get sick of myself.  I love how volunteering gets me out of head for awhile, how it takes the focus off of me, how it can put my struggles in perspective, and sometimes...just sometimes a fun surprise comes out of volunteering! Like this from my volunteering tonight at the Steven Curtis Chapman concert... In case you are wondering that's Steven Curtis Chapman and I.  ;)   Fun surprise from volunteering at the Show Hope table during his concert that night.  

Today I'm grateful for the multiple layers of grace.  Grace shows up in different ways for different people and at different times.  I've been thinking a lot about grace lately.  How I extend it, how I receive it, how it shows up in my day when I didn't even know I needed it, how God gifts us with it.  How have you seen grace in your life recently?

Today, and yesterday as well, I found myself grateful for laughter.  I needed a "laugh break" and got it!  Stop and think for a minute about laughter.   It's GOOD for you, it revives you, it releases tension and pressure.  Think about the people you know who don't laugh. Kinda hard to be around them right?  They make people miserable, they suck the joy out of people like a Hoover vacuum.  I'm so grateful for laughter that I want others to get their "laugh breaks" in.  Laughter, like gratefulness, is what does a heart good.  

Dang it.  I thought about this post all day long yesterday and then forgot to post it!  Oy. Today I am grateful for things that happen that, despite the negative circumstances surrounding them, are the silver linings to the clouds of the day or of the week!  Let me explain.  Today my husband went to his car to leave for work and I heard him trying to start the car.  It wasn't starting.  It was dead.  Not the best way to start the day BUT there is a silver lining!  The car died in our garage out of the way of anyone!  It didn't die in the middle of rush hour traffic where people would be honking at him and flipping him off (because of course anyone who has broken down in the middle of traffic plans for it to happen then because they like being honked at and flipped off...or not), it didn't die in some out of the way inconvenient place.  It died in our garage.  My friends, that is a silver lining and I am grateful for those.

I love music.  It in unfathomable to me those who aren't moved by any kind of music.  I'm a big lyrics girl and I'm partial to piano and guitar instrumental artists and albums.  I was thinking this morning how much a part of my life music is and has been. Not only is my family musical but I married a musician and have a songbird for a daughter.  I am moved by lyrics and heart.  Not a day goes by that a song doesn't describe my day or my thoughts or my emotions perfectly.  I am so grateful for music that I spent my very first 365 featuring a song a day!  I am most grateful for music on the days when I can't seem to find the words myself but a song comes along that puts it into words for me.

Today was a beautiful fall day.  The weather was crisp and bright and absolutely perfect for a fall day.  Every moment I was able to be outside I was grateful.  Fall is my favorite season and days like today truly did my heart good.

Today I was grateful for lounge pants.  Seriously.  Sometimes you just need something comfy and loose, you know?  And today that is what I was most grateful for.  :)

Sometimes I just have to be grateful for the day.  Sometimes there's not anything specific about the day that pops out at me so I decide to be grateful for the day.  In Lamentations and Psalms it talks about the new day and I often use both or one of those verses to remind myself that the day, on the whole, is something to be grateful for simply for the fact that God authored it and there are new mercies and compassions to be had.

Fall is my favorite season and rather than issue a Gratitude Attitude for the whole season I thought I would single out a few of the reasons. One of my most favorite things about fall that prompts gratefulness for me are the leaves changing color. I love the pockets of gold that present themselves amidst the green. I love seeing the deep reds (rare where I live but it happens every so often). Something shifts in my spirit when I see the colors changing.  Perhaps it is gratefulness that I get the privilege of going through another season, that I live in a place so beautiful that my breath is taken away almost daily.  Perhaps the colors changing speak deeper to me than the surface beauty. I connect deeply with transformation and changing and desiring my life to be colorful and full of beauty. Today I was driving in to work and my eyes were drawn to every pocket of fall color that was presenting itself. And then a friend posted the picture below on her FB and I just felt...grateful.

On October 10, 1974 my lifelong bestie was born.  I had been born about 6 weeks earlier.  Our parents had been in each other's weddings and were pregnant with us together.  I've got a picture of ours moms rubbing their very pregnant bellies together.  Sarah has known me longer than even my brothers, she was always more like my sister than my friend.  I called her parents Aunt and Uncle, still do actually. The last time I saw Sarah was October 31, 2008.  A few days later she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, which had been growing in her and poisoning her for an unknown length of time.  She passed from this life in December 2008. Not a day goes by that Sarah doesn't cross my mind and heart.  While we hadn't lived in the same state together since we were 7 we were connected, she is a very important part of my life.  Some days I hear a song and it makes me think of her and I and I reach for my phone to text her.  And then I remember.  This happens often, I forget unt

Lest I sound trite I'm going to have to start acknowledging the "givens" for Gratitude Attitudes. Some days I just get "stuck", usually it's on those days that nothing has really happened good or bad, nothing has really stuck out, it's just been a ho-hum kind of day that passed by.  But even with the "givens" shouldn't I be grateful?  To take for granted the "givens" means, in my opinion, that I have ceased to be grateful for even those.  A grateful heart, a gratitude attitude life, is grateful for all things, even or maybe especially the "givens".   So with that said... :) Today I am grateful for shelter, a house to call a home.  After traveling to my beloved Kenya and seeing other places in this world (even in my own city) where the kind of shelter I have is a luxury, I am not unaware of how blessed I am and I try to stay mindful of not taking the house we have for granted.  We have a roof that doesn't leak, w

Have you ever stopped to really reflect on the life you are celebrating when you sing or say "Happy Birthday" to someone?  Have you thought about that person and what they have accomplished in their years so far, or what they have been able to overcome, or what kind of legacy they are leaving?  Have you been able to celebrate the potential they have? Have you been able to celebrate how valuable they are despite mistakes they have made, hurts they may have caused, etc? Today I've been thinking about this and I feel grateful to be able to celebrate the life of my family and friends. I feel grateful to have the opportunity to speak life into their life, to show them how valuable I think they are, to encourage them to keep on keeping on.  If you feel grateful about being the one celebrated think about how grateful you can also be as the celebrator.

Today the hub and I celebrate 18 years of marriage, which I like to refer to as "marathon marriage".  I say this because my wise sister-in-law likened marriage to a marathon and not a sprint and if you're married you get it.  And you are wholeheartedly agreeing. So today, despite the lows that happen sometimes in marriage, I am choosing to be grateful for this marathon marriage that I am running with the hub.  I'm grateful that he puts up with me and my crap and still can say, "I love you."  I'm grateful that he made the choice to watch me grow up. (I was barely 21 when we married and still living with my parents, I had A LOT of growing up to do still.)  I'm grateful that he has different eyes when he looks at me than I have when I look at me.  I'm grateful that he believes I could do great things. I have my complaints and he has his but we are committed to going the distance of this marathon together and I'm grateful for that as well.

Today I was grateful for spontaneity, which I rarely practice given my Type A tendencies.  But every so often I can, and do, embrace it and am always pleasantly surprised at what happens when I allow it.  Today was definitely one of those days.  My friend, Stephanie, that I am visiting here in Seattle along with her daughter Emily and myself headed to EMP for a day of museum indulging. We had tickets for a 5 pm Duck tour  so we were planing on taking our time. But then.  Then riding up in an elevator from the parking garage the people next to us mentioned BrickCon going on right there.  We three eyed each other for about 10 seconds and said, "Let's go!  We'll still have time for EMP" and off we went to search out BrickCon, which is awesome because Lego's are awesome. On our way to BrickCon we heard about another festival, the Northwest Tea Festival on the same grounds.  That was another no brainer, we three love tea!  We squeezed in lunch at a place none of us

Today we headed to Leavenworth, WA for the Oktoberfest.  It was a 2 hour drive each way and it gave Stephanie and I opportunity to share more our lives and hearts with one another.  I know I learned more about her history and I'm guessing she learned more about mine.  There's something about being enclosed in a car that makes vulnerability and transparency feel safe. There's something about a drive in the car that makes it easier to process through something.  It was a beautiful day all around but today I was grateful for car ride conversations.

Today I am grateful for the opportunity to getaway and visit one of my besties in a city that I have wanted to visit "forever."  Today I flew into Seattle and am staying with the fabulous Stephanie Almeida.  Stephanie and I go all the way back to high school and in the past 6 years especially we have become close and I treasure her friendship in my life.  A few months ago she proposed me visiting for a long weekend.  The hub said go for it so I did and here I am!  And Seattle is putting on quite a display for me - beautiful weather - dry, sunny, perfect fall temps - and the hospitality and generosity of my friend is humbling.  Today we walked through the famed Pike Market and inhaled Seattle.  It was a perfect day to spend with my friend.  This getaway comes at a good  time, I needed a break from the day to day and my soul needed a chance to breathe.  I'm so grateful to my friend for hosting my getaway.  <3

I am grateful for the honor and the privilege to walk alongside of those who weep and those who rejoice. Have you ever considered that when you have people in your life, or on the fringes of your life, who are weeping and you are invited to weep on their behalf that it is an honor?  It is a sacred thing to be invited into someones struggles, pain, or grief and to weep with them and for them.  On the other side is the same kind of honor to be invited to rejoice with those who are rejoicing.  It is just as sacred to participate in that.  And when the privilege to weep and rejoice with and for others happens on the same day it can be bittersweet and yet I am filled with gratitude that I am invited into that intimate part of people's lives.  I hope, I pray, that I never take that honor for granted but I always treat it with the gratitude I feel today.  

Today a bestie gets her hip replaced.  My Dad had that done years ago and it is quite the operation.  I am super grateful for people who have gone through the educational system to gain the knowledge and skill to perform these kinds of surgeries plus so many other things.  My Mom is a retired nurse and she has saved my family a lot of money in co-pays over the years with what she knows.  She is my first phone call before a Doctor's office.  I am grateful for her knowledge.  I have a terrific "lady" Doctor, he is 'da bomb.  (He is so incredible that I would pay out of pocket to see him, seriously he's that amazing.) I am so grateful that he felt a prompt in his spirit and a call on his life to see to the health and wellness of women and their unborn children.  People in the medical profession are used by the Great Physician to heal and bring health and I am grateful for them every day.

Seriously.  I can't seem to get here daily which is weird since this is my THIRD 365.  {Sigh} I love a big blue sky.  And when I look up at the big blue sky I feel grateful for little things, things that I usually can't even find a name for.  Perhaps it is that I feel grateful for a new day.  For a new day to breathe deep, for a new day to try again, for a new day to grow more into who I really am, for a new day to share a smile with someone who needs it more than I, for a new day to help ease a burden.  Yes, blue skies give me hope for the day and I feel grateful for new days and new mercies .