The Best-Kept Secret for a Brand-New Life

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Also, I’m still scheduling speaking events for the new year. I’d love to join you in 2015 for a women’s event, a weekend retreat, or a holiday celebration.  You can check out my speaking topics here and contact me at Overflow@aliciabruxvoort.net if you have any questions or want to learn more about my speaking ministry.

Today, over at Proverbs 31 Ministries, I’m talking about how the daily grind can make us blind and God’s perfect prescription for our faltering eyes. It’s a story of a stretching stomach, a precious secret, and a little post-it note. If you haven’t read my devotion yet, you can find it here at Encouragement for Today.

And if you’re ready for a second-dose of inspiration, keep reading…

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 As a child, one of my favorite places to play was in a dusty plot of weeds on the perimeter of my uncle’s farm.

This “secret hideout”dotted with rusty oil barrels and timeworn tractor parts, provided hours of entertainment for my young cousins and me. Armed with unhurried hours and our wild imaginations, we spent the lazy days of summer searching for hidden treasure in the scraggly grass.

Of course, it wasn’t just the scraps and remnants that made that abandoned lot a childhood goldmine. The real jewel was the deteriorating shack perched in the middle of the mess.

 

No one seemed to remember the days when the shanty had been filled with life, but my cousins and I spun fanciful tales of cryptic farmhands and kind-hearted vagabonds who may have once called “our” humble house home. When we grew tired of imagining the stories of yesteryear, we’d pretend that we were modern day Boxcar Children living alone between the walls of that bedraggled abode.

By summer’s end, we’d memorized every inch of the paltry exterior, each crack and dent, every stripe and scar.

But the boarded-up door and tightly locked windows kept us from exploring the inside…until the afternoon we began stacking rocks. 

We’d been watching a spider spin an intricate web around the rusty drain pipe when my cousin suddenly noticed a broken window above the gossamer strands. A tree limb had fallen on the dusty pane, leaving jagged chinks in the filthy glass. My cousin had eyeballed the window quietly before wondering aloud if we could crawl through the newly-created entrance. 

Immediately, we’d tried to hoist the littlest cousin above our heads. But even our best attempts couldn’t boost her high enough to climb through the splintered passageway.

We’d shuffled around the perimeter of the house, kicking up dust and mumbling in frustration, and then Farm Boy had sauntered toward the barb-wired fence that separated the junkyard from the cornfield. He’d scanned the giant clods of dirt and stones strewn along the fence line, then he’d dropped to his knees and began to dig. He’d grunted and groaned as he heaved a hefty rock out of the sun-baked soil and proudly carried it back to to where we stood.

With a grin as wide as the endless stretch of farm fields, he’d deposited that slab of stone right beneath the broken window.

Suddenly, our inroad was obvious! 

With giddy excitement, we began lugging rocks across the littered lot and stacking them one on top of another. We piled stones until our arms ached and our fingernails turned a silty shade of brown. But before the sun slipped behind those stalks of golden corn, we’d built ourselves a makeshift ladder.

One by one, we scaled the craggy pile and creeped carefully through the splintered glass to get a glimpse of the treasures inside.

And treasures, there were! Brittle newspapers and rotting furniture, chipped coffee cups and dried up ink pens—the stuff of ordinary life preserved beneath a thick layer of dust, fodder to fuel our childish imaginations for countless summers to come.  

That pile of rocks opened our eyes to a whole new world. 
That stack of stones led us to new stories just waiting to be told.

Several years ago, after struggling for decades with the my own private battle of discontentedness, I accepted a friend’s gentle challenge to develop a daily discipline of giving thanks I didn’t consider myself a glass-half-empty kind of woman, but if I were honest, I was a seasoned closet grumbler. This wise comrade encouraged me to create a plan for practicing gratitude no matter how I felt.

I agreed to carve out five minutes each day to keep a gratitude journal. Each morning, before my kids woke, I would cup a hot mug of coffee in one hand and a black ballpoint pen in the other. And as the sun tiptoed across the horizon, I’d pull out a little striped notebook and write down a few things for which I was thankful. I certainly didn’t expect the habit to change my life, but I begrudgingly agreed that I had nothing to lose in the process. I didn’t realize it then, but at the heart of this simple endeavor was a question of faith.

At the time of my “gratitude experiment,” I was in a season of stuck-ness--a frustrating stretch of unanswered prayers, unrealized dreams, and unchanging limitations. I would often sit and stare at that blank page in my notebook and wonder what to write.  It was easy to thank God for miracles, but could I thank Him in the midst of my everyday mundane? 

Each morning when I grabbed a pen and settled my soul, I had to confront this lingering question–

Did I actually believe that God was the Giver of good gifts even if my dreams weren’t coming true?

Even if my marriage felt strained and shaky?

Even if my hours were a constant blur of dirty diapers, dirty dishes, and dirty laundry? 

Little by little, I began to fill the pages of that striped notebook with gratitude for the small stuff…

The feeling of my husband’s hand in mine when I climb exhausted into bed at the end of a long day.

The sound of my toddler’s belly-laugh.

A timely phone call from a friend on a lonely day.

A hot mug of coffee to sip as the sun rises.

The smell of warm bread in the oven.

 There were no giant miracles to list, no show-stopping answers to prayer,  just simple gifts tucked into the folds of my commonplace days.

But here’s the true miracle, friends—

Somewhere between the first page of that gratitude journal and the last, I began to look at my life in a different way.

I smiled more, laughed more, and treasured more. I complained less, compared less, and coveted less. I no longer wished to be living someone else’s story or impatiently begged God to change mine. I simply began to enjoy the extraordinary tale He was scripting right there in the midst of my ordinary life, a timeless tale of lavish faithfulness and grace.

I don’t pull out my little striped notebook anymore. It’s pages were filled long ago with a thousand simple gifts. But this morning, before my littlest boy padded down the stairs and my girls began to holler for help, I grabbed my sky blue journal and recorded some simple thanks for another day of breath and life, hope and grace. And tomorrow, whether I feel like it or not, I’ll do the same. Because God’s goodness is not based on my feelings, and Heaven’s gifts aren’t mine for the taking only on the days that I wake with a smile.

Just between you and me— I don’t ever plan to stop.

You see, I’ve realized that the habit of thanksgiving is an awful lot like stacking rocks on my uncle’s farm.

Gratitude opens our eyes to a whole new world.

Thankfulness is the inroad to the heart of God.

In His soul-stirring book,  The Rest of God, author Mark Buchanan  describes it this way– “Thankfulness is a secret passage into a room you can’t find any other way… It allows us to discover the rest of God- those dimensions of God’s world, God’s presence, God’s character that are hidden, always, from the thankless. But to give thanks, to render it as Scripture tells us we ought- in all circumstances, for all things, to the glory of God- such thanksgiving becomes a declaration of God’s sovereign goodness. Even more, it trains us in a growing awareness of that sovereign goodness. You cannot practice thankfulness on a biblical scale without its altering the way you see. And the more you do it, the more you find cause for doing it.”

We may not always be able to change the way our lives look, but gratitude always changes the way we look at our lives.

Gratitude changes our story, one small praise at a time.

So, go ahead, dear friend, stack some stones of thanks today. 

And as you do, I’m guessing that you’ll begin to see the treasures  in your life that have been there all along, just waiting to be discovered!

Photo credits: © Rebecca Abell | Dreamstime Stock Photos  © Szabolcs Stieber | Dreamstime.com © Pnovess | Dreamstime Stock Photos

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“Give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus.” (1 Thessalonians 5:18, NIV).

Today’s gratitude give-away is a beautiful notebook just waiting to be filled with your own scribbles of daily thanks.

It’s my hope that this simple resource will help you “stack some stones” and encourage you to begin growing the habit of thanksgiving in your own life. The empty pages of this lovely journal might be the perfect place to begin naming those gift in your life that are easy to overlook. 

If you’d like to be entered in the drawing to win, just join me for a praise party in the comments!

Name one thing for which you are grateful and, together, we’ll celebrate God’s good gifts.

 Happy Thanksgiving!