100 Days of Gratitude

I am celebrating today because it marks the 100th day of me being grateful.

At the start of the year, I bought myself a gratitude journal, with the intention of sitting everyday to consider five ways I am thankful. Over time, I have found myself looking forward to expressing gratitude, whether with my mouth or in writing. I like the idea of writing these out, because I can reference it in the future, and compare it to what my current experience is, and if any of my prayers concerning these gratitudes were answered.

I have spent most of my life, up until this year, being essentially an ungrateful brat. Whenever I had troubles in my life, especially growing up, I didn’t take me long to point the finger. At men. My parents. The girl that bullied me in school. You name it.

I’m going to skip over the last twenty-five years, but suffice it to say that I spent most of that time blaming my issues on other people. It was always other people’s jobs to help me get over them. And I certainly was not grateful for the terrible things that happened to me. I would always ask God why he was torturing me with a difficult life.

Then, at the start of this year 2025, after realizing I needed a reboot in my life, because I did not like the person I had become, I asked God to change me. One of my prayers at the time was that God would make me a more grateful person. And within weeks of the new year, I had bought my first-ever gratitude journal. Every day, I would write out five ways in which I was grateful. Then it progressed to a month. Two months. Three months. And now, today, we have reached the 100th day mark.

This practice of being thankful everyday has truly changed my life. It has really helped me to see that all things, whether perceived as good or bad, as inherently good. Or at least neutral in flavor. Yes, things happen every flippin’ day that make us want to blow our top, and I can assure you I have these days often. But I am thankful for those moments when I reflect on something presumably negative that happened to me. I find myself quickly reframing the situation, and telling God I’m thankful for it, because there is something He is teaching me through it. The more this occurs, the more the habit is ingrained. One day, I’m going to be thanking God for truly good things that happen to me, and in the same breath, expressing gratitude for really challenging ones. I’m really thankful for that. 🙂

As I celebrate today one hundred days of thanking God for all things in my life, I want to share with you that I am in the process of writing a book, a devotional called A Season of Gratitude: 90 Days of Giving Thanks to God, to be released later this year. For now, I hope you enjoy a poem I wrote a few months ago. See you next week!

THANK YOU AT DAYBREAK 

Thank you for early morning —
though darkness reigns,
I know that light
is on its way.

Thank you for
the breath I take —
the gift of love
given to me.

Thank you that I am
more than just a mist —
though life comes down
hard on me,
I raise my hands, and greet the day.

***

For more prose, follow this link to find my book, The Gift of a Rose, on Amazon. I first published it over twenty years ago, but it’s still as thought-provoking as the day I wrote them. 🙂