gratitude and prayer

How easily I get mired in the muck of everyday life and fail to recognize the little (and not-so-little) miracles that make up my day. It wasn't very long ago that each day was a struggle to get through without crying or having some sort of emotional breakdown; now, the waters have calmed, the sun is shining, and I'm breathing some huge sighs of relief. I'm trying to be conscious of my little successes and moments of happy: the skinny jeans that fit once again without pinching, the friendship that rekindled from animosity, the test score so high that it balanced out a failing test grade to put me half a point from an A. But I so easily forget. I move on to the next area of longing and discontent.

My friend Cheryl, filled with beauty and blue-eyed optimism, tells me about how she would write pages and pages in her journals - when she felt inspired to write. She'd have a week of novel-like entries, followed by months of nothing. I was nodding my head furiously in agreement to this - the words of my 9th grade English teacher ring in my head still: "consistently inconsistent". So, instead of having these feast-or-famine entries that chronicled times of struggle instead of day-to-day prayers and thanksgivings, she now limits herself to just two lines each day. One line is something she's thankful for; the other line is her prayer request, something she's asking of God. It may not be as wildly poetic as pages of rambling prose; it's relatively straightforward. But she does it every day, every night before she goes to bed. And this process allows her, so easily, to look back and see all the things she worried about that God took care of... and His faithfulness on the things that delighted her each day, the little miracles that I don't want to forget, either.

So, I've hauled my journal back out. I haven't done much pen-on-paper writing of my journal since I started blogging, but Cheryl inspired me: God's faithfulness is constant, but my memories of it have very short expiration dates. Writing it all down in just two lines a night is something I can do easily, and I hope the difference it makes in my heart is profound.