This Piece of Time

I love Thanksgiving.  It marks the beginning of all things "holiday".  I love the lighting of Christmas lights downtown on Wednesday night, the day of family and food on Thursday, and 12 blissful hours of shopping, and just being, with my mom on Friday.  But my favorite part of Thanksgiving has become the counting of blessings.  The focus on gratitude.  The intentional listing of both great and small.  This has become my joy. The simple act of choosing thanks can transform perspective.  The hardest of thanks can lift a spirit out of the trenches that engulf.  And while I cannot begin to explain this phenomenon as eloquently as Ann Voskamp has in One Thousand Gifts , I have been profoundly changed by it's reach.  For more than five months, I have been marinating in these lessons of gratitude and working to find grace in the hard.  And then yesterday, she spoke straight to my heart. "If I close these fingers, try to hold, hoard the river - dam up the grace- won