Gratitude

Its been a while…

Its been a while since I last sat on my deck, listened to the birds talk to each other, carve their own trees, as I enjoyed the gentle breeze caress my face like the fingers of a mother in a newborns face. I immediately thought “coffee and book–me-time.”

The last time I’d admired the simple things of nature in a cool morning rather than a brisk one had been what it felt like two lives ago. I finally got to clean my desk after all the debris that the snow left behind. The temperature finally hit 72 degrees yesterday and it is 54 this morning.

“What a joy and blessing” I said. I thought to myself “I’m not sure how many can see this as a blessing, but I am blessed today”. Reflecting as I sat down I thought “It seems almost impossible that something so white, pure and clean, that falls from the sky could leave us with so much trouble and in situations hard to come out of.” Once the snow becomes hard, we can hardly do anything but wait for it to melt. The same is true in a lot of situations in our lives. Sadly that’s how satan, works. The one who once was the whitest and brightest angel in heaven now works in this world to serve as an obstacle, orchestrating every situation and making people believe that evil is good. There’s a slight difference, however, once the situations in life get extremely hard we can count on God to make them better.

As I sat on my deck on complete gratitude it came to my mind the many reasons we have not to be grateful for. If we sat down and looked at ourselves in an ordinary day and what WE collectively [as a world] have gone and are still going through, we could say that we have so many things going wrong. That there is so much that we can’t find good. There’s so much trouble in this world, come on–look at the year we just went through, pandemic kicked our most secret places and left us with a new year full of insecurity for many. There are so many individuals dealing with self-esteem issues, mental illness, isolation, domestic abuse, abandonment, harassment, racism, insecurities, abuse of power, poverty is at its peek and did I mentioned mental illnesses? Yes, studies show that mental illness is worse than even.

But with all of the mentioned above can we really say anything to the homeless community… they really have it hard. Can we tell them come on get over it, it’ll be okay, this pandemic will be over soon? I even wonder who is vaccinating them…but that’s for another article.

They’ve been getting hit hard, they’ve been suffering pain, rejection and isolation, they’ve been socially distant and discriminated against, they’ve been suffering a pandemic, they’ve been poor, they’re mental illness has been destroyed, they’re PTSD has been affected more than once. They have home insecurity, food insecurities, lack of family and governmental support, poor hygiene and health care. But more than all of that, a lot of the time when you give them a little they have a lot of gratitude.

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Often times we focus on what rattles up the “common” that we forget what is truly uncommon. This is how I felt this morning with a temperature of 54 degrees and a backyard that needs to be redone after snow storm after snow storm. May the little and the common in our lives help us see the big and what should not be common in another individual’s life.

“May our struggles today, help us be grateful like those who have been struggling a lifetime.”

Thank you for reading, please don’t forget to reach out for coaching, counseling or crisis response needs.

©️2021 Denise Kilby New Hope MHCLC. All rights reserved.