45. Today I am grateful for a day of gratitude

Today Canadians celebrated Thanksgiving, a day where we are encouraged to focus on the things that we are grateful for. I am grateful for a day of gratitude. There is power in a nation coming together in thanksgiving for one day. However, we should strive to live each day with a grateful heart. I really like what Elder Quentin L. Cook said during his recent general conference address: “We should be grateful for all the tender mercies that come into our lives. We are unaware of hosts of blessings that we receive from day to day. It is extremely important that we have a spirit of gratitude in our hearts.”

One of my favourite things about Thanksgiving is getting together with family and friends and eating good food. Today, I am grateful for friends who invited me over to have thanksgiving dinner with them. Yesterday a ward member invited my roommate and I over for dinner and today a friend of mine and his wife invited me over. It was neat because tonight half of us were Canadian and the other half were American. Two of those Americans have just recently moved to Canada and celebrated their first Canadian thanksgiving today, one of them being my roommate. I am also looking forward to celebrating American Thanksgiving next month!

Being that I have been writing in this blog for over a month now I thought it would be a good time to reflect on my experience. I was recently talking with my sister who mentioned that she hadn’t seen any posts on my blog lately and asked if I was not grateful for anything anymore. I had just been talking about some things that hadn’t been going well and replied that sometimes I think it would be easier to write about the frustrating thing of the day. However, I do feel that it has made a difference in my life to reflect on the day and the things I am grateful for and choose one to write about. I am trying to focus more on the simple things to be grateful for. It usually seems easier to think of the big and significant things but by August 27, 2012 I would like to see a list of 365 unique things that I am grateful for.

Also, there will be times that it appears I don’t have updated posts. What I do sometimes is save the topics as a draft and then go back to finish writing and posting for that day.

What are you grateful for on this Thanksgiving?