Gratefulness Warm-Up

Gratefulness.

It stretches out the kinks in my warped, convoluted, and inward-bending thinking.

Like the warm up before the miles ahead, God has been reiterating my need to say thank you and count my blessings before coming to Him with my weariness and requests.  

The miles are not so long when I have said "Thank you," before beginning them.  

This verse has been my constant reminder and has been changing the color and transparency of my heart towards Him:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving, let your requests be made known to God.  

Phillipians 4:6

I have been especially devoted to my prayer and thankfulness journal, and it has been my catalog of all the small events that have made my life into something lovely and glorifying to Him. 

When I remember that my life has a storyline, and more importantly, that I am not the heroine of this story, I begin to see the patterns in His plan for me woven into this story. 

I have more faith in the intentionality of his hand in my life and have more confidence in Him to ward off the fear of the chaotic, the seemingly random. 

I begin to feel myself stepping within His story, my footfalls matching the rhythm of his heartbeat, rather than the disjointed, uneven stumbling that I make on my own, fighting against the flow of His life for me.