2024 Gratitude Series: Prologue

Last year, I embarked on a multi-post gratitude series from Thanksgiving until Christmas (really, New Year’s Eve!) for multiple reasons:

• First, because it had been many, many, many years since I had last done this exercise, even after having returned to blogging. Gratitude is always a good thing to practice at any time of the year, but with it being Thanksgiving yet again, at the very least it’s good to take the big honkin’ obvious reminders that are placed in front of me as an opportunity to do this.
• Second, I had had a lot of life changes since the last time I had shared the list of things I’m grateful for (including finally having a wonderful woman in my life!), that I was long overdue in sharing them. This included not only my now-wife but also so many other people that God had put in my life, including most of all, Himself. And some of the people I shared my gratitude for having them in my life were people that I was finding it quite challenging to have relationships with. Which leads to my last point…
• Third, I was still in the midst of a long season of mental, emotional, and spiritual suffering. I hadn’t yet broken from it (that would come some months later), so I was still fighting to repeatedly try to find good things to hold on to, yes, including God, but also other smaller things that I could perceive with any of my five senses on a day-to-day basis. Believe it or not, gratitude helps keep one sane. But it is a fight.

So I’m at it again this year because, while the trials that marked my life a year ago have ended, I’m still struggling with their impacts. And while I could share my gratitudes regarding specific individuals again (and I will in a bit), I’m feeling prompted to share memories where I can name that God showed up and/or came through, etc., because in spite of what I believe to be many, many instances of this, my “prayers” in my worst moments have tended to reveal that I forget about these things just as quickly.

My choosing to write about it will not and cannot erase any future instance where I grumble and complain again. I don’t know how to change that part of myself. All I have is the Law which says it is sin. But what I hope to do is, by sharing these stories, open myself up to the Lord in other ways that might allow me to receive things from Him that somehow I’ve been resistant to do.

That will come in future posts in this set. Meanwhile, here is a list of who and what I’m grateful for:

1. Jesus (remember, I have to put Him first)
2. My love, who is now my wife
3. That my wife and I got married this year and it was a wonderful day for all who attended
4. Our apartment
5. My job
6. My wife’s job
7. My car
8. My wife’s car
9. Our church
10. Our pastor
11. My counselor, who I still see for individual sessions once a month (because I still need it)
12. My dad
13. That I am on good terms with my mom and stepdad
14. That my love and I are now on good terms with her parents
15. My best man Ty Rawlins (yes, continuing the pseudonym game) with whom we call, check in, and support one another weekly
16. My other friend that I also call most weeks and we support each other
17. A friend from college with whom we call roughly once a month (sometimes once every couple months) and we check in and support each other in a goals-oriented way
18. A couple of other college friends that I recently connected with over the last couple months after being out of touch for years, and having an opportunity to really catch up
19. A hope that next year my wife and I will be able to go to Minnesota to visit with the aforementioned college friends from the last couple bullet points, and I can introduce them to her and vice versa
20. Anytime my friend Caleb Redding (pseudonym) is in town. His most recent visit, which took place over a week in late-October, yielded a couple wonderful dinners out, one of which included a series of laughter-bursting pranks as well as a “new” connection that could bear fruit in both the personal-friendship and professional areas of life

Speaking of the aforementioned “new” connection: I caught up with a guy I kinda knew at my old church, but he was really more of a friend-of-a-friend. That is, until he asked me at that one dinner if I still wrote music, to which my wife immediately responded, “ohhh yeah! He sure does!” Since then, we met up for coffee to lay the groundwork for a friendship as well as a business connection, and next steps look promising. Back to the list of gratitudes:

1. My church band which allowed me to play and praise/worship God with them when my 2^nd job let me go at the end of last year
2. My off-and-on again band, Ring Shout (now going by the title “Sons of Ring Shout”) continuing to rehearse on average once a month since Mark the Drummer passed away last February
3. The once-a-month music sessions with Songs by Heart at a nursing home not far from home
4. God giving me new compositions, pieces, and songs to write

I’m sure there are many more, but those are all the big ones I can think of that happened in the last year. One of the last ones I’ll mention is that God took me through a successful reading through the Bible (chronologically) from Genesis to Revelation. I had attempted to do so in 2022 but got waylaid about 2 months in and failed to keep up the program. With God’s help I not only finished it this time around but finished it about a month-and-a-half early, in mid-November. Every time I read through Scripture I always pick up new things. What I have found kind of disappointing is how unfamiliar I was with much of the New Testament, even though I’ve read it all the way through before. Some of Paul’s lesser-known letters that still made it into the Canons of Scripture addressed very specific situations that would still apply to other situations today.

That said, I need to begin another read-through soon. There’s really no prize for successfully managing to read through the Bible from end-to-end except just that. The real prize is going back to the Word over and over again to learn more about Jesus Christ and grow deeper in relationship with Him. He is the prize.

I press toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus. Philippians 3:14, NKJV