Remember when you are sitting at the Thanksgiving table tomorrow....

to be thankful for the blessing of the family that surrounds you. Yes, that family may drive you nuts, make you cringe with some of their jokes or remarks, may bore you with the same stories year after year, may make your stomach hurt with a special recipe that never turns out so wonderful, etc. BUT you are blessed to have a family! This year as I gather around my 2 Thanksgiving tables with both sides of the family, I will look around and know that I am blessed to belong. In response to my gratitude for the blessing of a family, I will be giving to help fund the adoptions of those that hope that soon they too will be a part of someone's Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and  plain-ole'-everyday table!

I encourage you to make this part of your tradition this Thanksgiving: to find a family that is seeking to adopt a child or for a child that is waiting to be adopted and has a fund set up for when their forever family finds them.

Here are a few suggestions to connect you with a child/children that you could support:

At http://positivelyhopefilled.wordpress.com/ you will find the story of a little boy who changed our lives. (you can read about it here http://godismakingaway.blogspot.com/2011/09/where-it-all-started.html).

OR

You can go to http://www.reecesrainbow.com/ to learn about all sorts of special needs children from around the world who are awaiting adoption.

OR

http://projectfindher.org/pfh/ for a local family's upcoming adoption.

Wishing you and your family a very blessed Thanksgiving!

Got Gratitude?

Psalm 95:1-6
Come, let us sing for joy to the LORD;
   let us shout aloud to the Rock of our salvation.
Let us come before him with thanksgiving
   and extol him with music and song.
 For the LORD is the great God,
   the great King above all gods.
In his hand are the depths of the earth,
   and the mountain peaks belong to him.
The sea is his, for he made it,
   and his hands formed the dry land.
 Come, let us bow down in worship,
   let us kneel before the LORD our Maker.

I decided to join many others in the "gratitude challenge" this November. Basically on facebook, I post one thing I am grateful for each day. A few samples from my posts :

I'm grateful for my couch, which I fully intend to collapse on it tonight.
or
Today I am grateful for Jonah's explanations that he gives me about why he gets in trouble at school because they make me laugh (which helps with being irritated that he keeps getting in trouble!). He was in trouble for making toys into weapons and he told me that this was not true, he did not make said toy into a gun, only a lightsaber which noises were not a "pow pow" of a gun but a "pzpzpzpz." Then he goes on to say, "But mom I tried widdy, widdy hawd not to get in trouble...it was at the end of the day." God bless his teachers.

One thing I have noticed in the past few days is that I'm looking for the next thing to be "grateful" for instead of focusing so much on things I could complain about. Further, when I start to have those negative, complaing thoughts, I almost have made it a game of "what could be something to be grateful about in this situation?" For instance, the other day it started to snow. I was not thrilled. I'm not a huge fan of snow and being cold. However, I looked out my office window and you should have seen the faces of the kids leaving the preschool, they were so EXCITED! I was grateful to see this thing that I wouldn't necessarily call a blessing for me, be a blessing to someone else. I know my kids can get on my nerves when they are fighting with one another, but I can remind myself that I can be grateful that they are healthy enough to do so and that they have siblings to fight with.

Do do you have a spirit of gratitude? If not, take this next month and cultivate a spirit of gratitude. My hope is that while I am doing this for the month of November, it will become a habit and something that I will carry as a permanent discipine in my life.

If you haven't already, I hope you will join me in the gratitude challenge!