Godly Insights for the 21st Century Life

Today is Thanksgiving here in America, a day filled with family, turkey, and football. It's also a day to reflect on the things we are thankful for (which may or may not include the family, turkey, and football). However, I think thankfulness should not just be reserved for one specific day. The leader of a group on Facebook that I am a member of has created a "30 Days of Thankful" challenge for the group members. Each day, she posts something she is thankful for, and the rest of us reply with things we are thankful for that day. Doing this every day has really challenged me to think every day about what I'm thankful for, which means that I have been more open to seeing the good in each day. Not only that, but since I have decided to write something different each day, I have been challenging myself to come up with a variety of things to be thankful for. I have enjoyed the challenge so much that I plan to continue thinking of at least one thing I'm thankful for ...

This past summer, I read the book Me, Myself, and Lies  by Jennifer Rothschild, and it really made me think. If you read my post " What are You Really Saying? " you know that I realized that at least for me, saying "I can't believe I said/did/forgot/lost that!" was really a way to put myself down, and I was determined to stop saying it. However, this book helped me to realize that though I wasn't saying things like that out loud, I was still putting myself down. I was challenged to continue to assess how I talk to myself. In the book, Jennifer compares our thoughts to items in a closet. We have the comfy ones that we wear so often that they start to wear out, but we refuse to stop because we love them so much. We have the ones that aren't our favorites, but we will wear them at certain times and they fit us well enough. Then there are the ones that we never wear because they don't fit and we don't like them. However, she likens our negative tho...