Gratitude and Thankfulness-Day Fifteen

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life.  It turns what we have into enough, and more.  It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity.  It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.  Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.
Melody Beattie

Happy Wednesday Friends!

Today I'm thankful for this quote on gratitude.  My Mom sent it to me when I first embarked on the 30 Days of Gratitude.  I have to confess that I had to look up Melody Beattie and she is fascinating!  She is a best-selling self help author who introduced the world to the term "codependency".  What I find so amazing about her is that in her own life she suffered every sort of atrocity that you can think of yet she found a way to come out on the other side.  She is quoted as saying, "If I put half as much energy into doing the right thing as I had into doing wrong, I could do anything".  Yowzaa.  It really makes me wonder about my own life and if I would have the kind of personal strength to weather such storms in life. 

I'm a planner and as much as I'd love to just live in the moment I'm always thinking ahead.  Now, I'm not knocking a well thought out list and with the holidays approaching I must admit I'm thinking ahead.  My personal goal is to not do any Christmas shopping until Advent starts but as the catalogs arrive I find myself comparing deals and dog earring pages.  Hubby and I were discussing Thanksgiving plans this morning.  Do we go to a friends home?  What should we eat at home?  What produce needs to be pre-ordered etc.   I'm drawn back to this quote.  Gratitude can turn.......Chaos to order, confusion to clarity.

On one of my favorite blogs, http://bonzaiaphrodite.com/, she commented on how Thanksgiving was one of her favorite holidays because it is one of the only holidays that's not religious, brings people together around good food to give thanks and is not focused on commercialism.  She's right.  Gratitude can turn a meal into a feast......brings peace for today, and creates visions for tomorrow. 

Friends, I hope you have a wonderful day and my prayer and hope is that we may all graciously realize that we already have full lives and more than enough. 

Bussi, Bussi!