About

"Rejoice always, pray without ceasing, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for you." 1 Thessalonians 5:16-18



The idea for this blog was inspired by the apostle Paul and Ann Voskamp's book and blog, both titled One Thousand Gifts. Paul sang praise and thanks to God when he was in prison and broke his chains, and Voskamp encourages people to live lives of radical gratitude at least in part by keeping a gratitude journal.

No one wants to hear me sing praise and thanks to God, but writing...that I can do.

Those of you who've followed my other blog, Questioning my Intelligence, know I've been keeping a Gratitude Journal on Mondays for several years now. I chose Mondays because we tend to think of Monday as the worst day of the week. By starting that day with an attitude of gratitude, I hoped to transform Mondays into an awesome start to the week.

While my attitude of gratitude is certainly more mature now than it was a few years ago, I still have a long way to go. Mondays were a good start, but Paul's verses from 1 Thessalonians and Voskamp's book have nudged me to expand my gratitude journal in two ways.

1. This blog. A place for quick journal posts on as daily a basis as life allows.

2. An artist's journal. This old-fashioned creative journal will allow for more visual self-expression in my favorite medium: paper and ink. I will post photos of its pages as they come.

My hope is that this blog will become a rich, diverse collection of inspiration to transform common days into thanksgivings, a place of refuge and grace and peace. It will also be a more explicitly Christian blog than QmI is, although I hope that people of all beliefs will feel welcome and comfortable here. The Holy Spirit has very purposefully not given me a gift of Evangelism, but my gifts of Faith and Mercy will have free rein here.  

I hope for many of you that the comments on this blog will become your own journal of thansgivings. If sharing my thanksgivings helps inspire you, just imagine how your thanksgivings will inspire me and everyone else who reads!

If you decide to start your own gratitude journal blog, let me know, and I will link to it in the sidebar of this blog. I will only link to blogs that are exclusively gratitude journals, though. We will keep the focus on gratitude.

And let's see where that leads us.