What I would like to do is wake up each morning count my blessings, face each day with a smile in my heart, and always look on the bright side of life. Instead what I am doing is feeling overwhelmed, beaten down, and used up. Life keeps throwing new challenges at me and just when I feel like I have had enough it gives me more. The thing is there is a bright future there. I am surrounded by three loving children and a gem of a wife. I live in a nice house, drive a nice car, have a good family, and own my own business. Everything looks great but feels like it is built on a house of cards on shifting sands, and I am waiting for it all to crumble around me.
Plans and schemes and hopes and dreams are all worth the same when nothing is working out or I can’t see the forest for the trees. That is what gratitude is. It is taking a step back and looking at the whole picture. It isn’t walking into the darkest part of the woods and finding the most baren and rotten tree and saying, “Look everything is terrible.” Gratitude is taking that step back and seeing the bright green leaves and hundreds of healthy trees.
We spend our lives lost in a dark forest trying to get out. Instead we should set up a tent and embrace the night. Life is a challenge right now, but challenges are meant to be overcome. I have my family by my side with both their support and love.
This is the day God made. Look at the world around us and how just this past Monday we spent a morning walking in the woods. One that I hope is the first of many. I want to go to more and more state parks and see so much of the state that I haven’t. Now most of it will be in our own backyard. I doubt we’re going to take a trip down to Douthat State Park or Big Stone Gap State Park but we can explore a few of the ones an hour or so away.
If life is a journey then we should focus neither on the obstacles or the destination but the path ahead. We lose sight of where we are going when we only focus on where we are. The next step for today is to find out if we have baseball, and if we do we spend a fun afternoon playing a baseball game and eating some pizza before packing it in until next season. That’s the next step and that’s the focus.
Dear Lord,
I am grateful for the day you made.
The path you laid.
The life you blessed me, and
even the challenges set before me.
David Huzzard Writes 