31 Days of Gratitude

Friends to dream with – gift.

Last week I posted about dreaming big, God-sized dreams.  God gave me a dream, a ‘little’ dream that my sweet roommate is helping me make a reality.

It is called 31 days of gratitude.  Counting gifts, things I am thankful for, has been a life changing practice for me over the past few years.  Inspired by One Thousand Gifts by Ann Voskamp, I learned how to change my perspective on life by looking for the blessings and treasures throughout the day rather than focusing on all the things that go wrong.  One of my soul-friends and I started a JOY journal where we counted gifts and mailed it back and forth to each other throughout our college years. (Now we get to exchange it in person since we both live in Colorado, which is just another blessing to add to the list.)

So I was journaling the other day, February 21, to be exact, and was just feeling a little frustrated and pessimistic.  So I turned to a new page and starting listing things that had brought JOY to my life recently.

And I got to 21 things I was thankful for, and a thought popped into my head, “What if…What if we had to come up with the amount of things we are thankful for to match the date of that day?”

I quickly texted my JOY-friend and suggested it…could we do it? Man, by the end of the month you’d be counting a lot of gifts. But that’s not a bad thing.

And like great friends do, she responded with energetic agreement: “I LOVE IT”

And then I mentioned it to my roomie who quickly said, “I can make that for you, no problem!”
We make a good team.  Because dreams are better when dreamt together, and so here it is: 31 days of gratitude.

Starting March 1^st. It starts out so easy; can you think of just one thing you are thankful for? And then it will progress, each day adding to the list. But it will train us to be looking for the gifts each day, so that by the end of it you’ll be able to list 31 gifts no problem…and you will have a JOY-ful heart and a list of 496 things you were blessed by in the month of March.

Cool, right?!?!? (Might as well round up to 500…but let’s not get ahead of ourselves)

It all starts with a thank you.  A shift in the lens you see the world through; all it takes is looking for the gifts.  Think of it as a day long treasure hunt.

Please consider joining us.  All it takes is a printer, a pen, and a willing heart.

We have it made in a PDF so all you need to do is print it out and start counting tomorrow! The link is below!! (Also, for the JOY of journeying together - why not share on social media? #31daysofgratitude)

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5431kdM7EQKRlc5VzNqdzVGVWs/edit?usp=sharing

Nicaragua and God-sized Dreams

I took a journey down memory lane the other day via my college journals, and stumbled upon entries about the process of the mission trip I co-led to Nicaragua. I journaled from the day I found out I’d be leading to when we were actually there and then the days when we returned to snow covered New England. 
See I started out planning that trip feeling like the least qualified person to be doing it. And I basically was.  The process was filled with anxiety and tossing and turning, imagining all the ways I could screw it up and all the ways it could go wrong.
And then the trip came, and it went so perfectly.  Everything went the way we planned and our team was the greatest and we came back with heavy feet, wishing we could stay forever.

The greatest successes and the greatest joys come when we surrender ourselves to situations for which we feel (and probably are) completely unqualified, and trust that God led us there and will continue to guide us through.  

We see lots of pinterest inspirational quotes like this one: 

Which is true.  But I think its more than that.
I think God wants us to dream (and gives us dreams) that are so big and so out of our control that we cannot achieve them on our own.  

It reminds me of how wrongly we have accepted that quote, “God won’t give you more than you can handle.” It is, in my opinion, the exact opposite.  I think He gives us more than we can handle almost all the time.  And that reaches beyond our struggles, even to our dreams and future accomplishments.
He gives us such big dreams and hopes and challenges that there is no way we could handle them without Him. Luckily for us, as the giver of such big gifts, only He is capable of carrying them.

I just think that once we start doing things that scare us and that we feel inadequate for is exactly when He steps in and helps us accomplish the impossible. It is like He actually says, “Reach for the stars!” These are the moments when we are doing what we were made for.

I’ve just been thinking about this because this season of life I and my peers are in where we are figuring out what our lives are going to be about.  What am I going to do with my life?  And it often is when we start dreaming and thinking about the goals or hopes that we have, and often might start making a list of all the reasons we can’t achieve them.
But I’ve had several encouraging conversations with friends who are dreaming and reaching for the careers or places that will scare them senseless but fill them with overwhelming joy and satisfaction.  
When the planning/organizationally minded friend starts applying for event planning jobs at fancy hotels.
And then the one with a heart for teens starts reaching out to high schoolers who need her and Jesus more than she ever could have realized.
And the joy-friend who, ‘surprise!’, just might receive a dream career out of a summer job that she loved and thrived in.
And the graduating one who might just use her life experiences to bless college kids in residence life.

And the one who applies for internships that just might be a perfect fit – in places only the Lord could’ve led her to. 

He leads, we follow, and He surprises us and overwhelms us with dreams too big for us to hold and seek on our own. And when we trust, He helps us succeed and accomplish things we never would have ever imagined we were capable of.  
Trust and hope in the dreams in your heart, because they are God-given and therefore, with God, achievable.  “Nothing is impossible with God” (Luke 1:37).

Happy dreaming (: 

"You Complete Me"

When your desire for God outweighs your desire for anything else, that is when you will have true ______.

Fill in the blank.

I started off my morning by just rattling off apologies to Jesus, as I stared in the mirror getting ready for the day. 

I am sorry I don’t pay more attention to You. 

I am sorry I choose Netflix over You on a daily basis.

I am sorry I plan my future on my own and let my heart and imagination run way ahead of You and Your plan. 

And I went back to getting ready and heard Him say this: 

When your desire for God outweighs your desire for anything else, that is when you will have true ______.

It is really true for any word.

Trust, peace, wholeness, love, you pick.  Whatever it is you feel like you need, that is how to find it.

I think for me right now it is satisfaction.  To be content.

I have decided my prayer word for the year is satisfy.  Mostly because of songs with lyrics that keep sticking out to me:

“Your love is all that can satisfy.”

“We believe You will satisfy.”

“There’s nothing in this world that could ever satisfy.”

And also because I keep expecting other things to make me content and satisfied with life and it just doesn’t. ever. work.

“Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”  (Matthew 6:21)

Where your focus is, there your time will be also.  Where your desire is, there your emotions will be also.  Where your trust is, there your security will be also.

Where you put your time, heart, energy, trust – that is what you are hoping will satisfy you. 

I have placed it in my friends. My family. My job. My grades. My athletic performance. My ability to listen.  My ability to love, and to be loved.  My hope for beauty.

Where have you placed your treasure? Your hope? Your satisfaction?
And has it ever actually fulfilled you?

Philippians 4:11 says “I have learned in whatever situation I am to be content.” Because… “The Lord is my Shepherd, I have everything I need” (Psalm 23 NCV).

I truly believe that God being our one, true desire and true love is the only way to find a life of fullness.  Of true satisfaction and completeness.

John 10:10 – “I have come that they may have life, and life to the full.”

I think we waste most of our lives waiting for whatever it is that will ‘complete us’.  And we will never find it.  Because as soon as that thing comes, we realize that it isn’t actually what we needed to feel “full”. 

Jeremiah 2:13 says that we have failed to trust that He is the Living Water, and we have dug our own cisterns, “broken cisterns that cannot hold water”.

Until we understand that only Jesus satisfies, we will be running around drinking from all different water sources only to remain thirsty and unsatisfied.