I was just sure that I would have instant results from this counting to one thousand gifts experiment. You know, feeling all light and airy and...well, all holy and sanctified. I was thinking {hoping} I would immediately feel more at ease and more centered.
It has not been so. I am enjoying it, to be sure. As I write down the blessings, I do have real sense of just how blessed I truly am. But the sanctification part that I was hoping for isn't really happening just yet. I definitely feel my countenance changing. Ever so slowly. S-l-o-w-l-y.
I'll go ahead and confess a few things here. First of all, I have felt a little guilty about the "quality" of the blessings I seem to be writing down. Are they too materialistic? Too much the same from blessing to blessing? Are they authentic enough? I also feel as if the counting of blessings is somehow worrying me a little. Like, am I aware enough of all of the blessings in my life? Or I only write down one or two at a time and this somehow makes me feel like I'm taking the blessing that is my life for granted.
And then I remember the book. I remember her having trouble with this, too.
"Do not disdain the small," she said. "The whole of the life - even the hard - is made of of the minute parts, and if I miss the infinitesimals, I miss the whole...There is a way to live the big of giving thanks in all things. It is this: to give thanks in this one small thing. The moments will add up."
I am not even to fifty yet. I should just chill out and let the little graces accumulate. I am hoping at the end of this I won't do this {as much} anymore. You know, beating myself up over the small stuff and whatnot.
After all, "life-changing gratitude does not fasten to a life unless nailed through with one very specific nail at a time."
And so, I begin again. Counting the gifts. Counting all as a gift. Worrying less about what is written and just getting to writing it all down. In the midst of the chaos there is charis {grace}. I am finding it.
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