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Close your eyes and focus on the darkness for a minute….

Please, seriously, just try it… what you’ll gain from this little exercise is well worth feeling silly for a bit.

For many people in this world, that is the daily reality. Every minute. Every day.

If one of them were to stop by and offer you a million dollars for your eyes, for your ability to continue reading, for your ability to see this world and watch your kids grow up… would you?

And yet, have you ever really appreciated your ability to see?

The Entitlement Trap and the Attitude of Gratitude

Like many of you, I’ve always felt jaded about sayings like “count your blessings” or “be thankful for what you have” and so on. When I heard or read that I should be thankful for my ability to see or walk or whatever, I mentally rolled my eyes.

I took everything I had for granted. Worse, I felt cheated when I didn’t get more of what I wanted. Even though I have a wonderful child, I felt sad about my inability to have a second one. Even though I’m married to a really nice guy, I nagged him constantly about what he was not. Even though I had a great job, I hated almost every minute of it.

I hadn’t quite realized it then, but I had defaulted to a person who was constantly unhappy about what I didn’t have instead of being happy about what I did.

And then serendipity brought me to the blog Money Saving Mom. At the outset, the blog is about saving money. And that’s how I found it in the first place. My daughter was just born and I desperately needed diaper deals. So, I found a whole bunch of “deal blogs” and this was one of them.

As my daughter grew older and diaper deals were not relevant to me anymore though, I dropped the other deal blogs. But somehow continued to read Money Saving Mom. There was something different about this blog and its founder Crystal Paine.

Crystal is a devout Christian and writes often about gratitude and grace and such. And even though I am agnostic, I was attracted to how her faith was bringing her happiness and making her a calm, very likeable person (even though I didn’t know her at all!).

Around the same time, during a conversation with some friends, the topic of prayers came up. One of my friends, the one I least expected, admitted that she says a prayer every night before going to bed. She said it was a “habit” that her parents got her into while she grew up, and it gives her a lot of peace, so she still continues it to this day.

I was going through a very rough season in my life then and often felt lost and confused. One night on a whim, [Read more…]