Small Success Thursday

I started last week, I'm sticking with it.   Welcome back to another edition of Small Success Thursday. 

This week held within it, lovely moments like my daughter's acapello concert.   Here's the video.  (I'm boasting because well, I'm proud). 

It also held a quiet moment when I could only gasp.  On Tuesday, I'd misplaced my rosary. This rosary was given to me by my eldest daughter from her trip to Italy. It came from Padua, from the Shrine of Saint Anthony. It's beautiful. It's precious to me, and I tore apart my room looking.  I also looked in the car, turned my purse and my satchel inside out several times, and begged Saint Anthony to help me find it.  Frustrated and defeated, I took myself to adoration and prayed with a plastic rosary, and made my peace with the loss.   I found one rosary of mine (a purple crystal one), in the back of my car.  I found a silver and white one of mine, in a drawer.  I laughed, they were rosaries, just not that one. 

The next day, half way through work, I reached into my purse to fish out a dollar for a diet coke, and found the red velvet bag with the rosary inside of it, in my zippered pocket.  I'd turned the whole purse inside out. I'd gone through every pocket.  Saint Anthony, I owe you one.  I sat there shaking my head...because the thing was...to get me to pray the rosary, rather than worry about the nature of the beads. Yes, I still felt very happy to find it. 

The next small success came with my youngest daughter making a list of careers for herself including pet watcher, park ranger, artist, boss, taste tester for Tasty Cakes or Entenmann's, contestant on a game show, art teacher, movie maker and nun.   I'm saving the list. 

In the car, on the ride to school, we've worked on practicing gratitude.  We played a game of listing twelve blessings a person.  You couldn't repeat someone else's blessings.   It helped. 

Those are my big moments from the past week.   Hope you had a great week filled with small successes.   

At the Register Today

Writing about the Rosary, because every time I stop, I get reminded to start again. 

The Rosary is also, a Thank you note.

And if you need me, I just read my piece...going to go find my purse and get to work saying a thank you. 

Link up to Small Success Thursday

You'd think with summer, I'd be more timely in my linking to posts but no. You would be wrong.  Today's link up to Small Success Thursday is being posted on Saturday because well, somehow, summer is more busy than the rest of the school year, or this summer any way.  

I will tell you, I've been writing Small Success Thursday for years, and every once in a while, I consider retiring it.  It's then that someone reads the column and gives me a little wave, and that's all it needs for me to continue.  So I'm grateful to the woman who read my piece and took the time to tell me, it helped her.  It helped me start again for the next week. 

Here's this week's Small Success Thursday.

Small Success Today

This week, we focus on Thanking it forward. Cultivating gratitude for that which we have yet to receive is a good way to prepare for all of life. So count the blessings you hope for, and say thank you.

1) for all the prayers of my friends and family, for the graces they receive.  Thank you.
2) for getting out to exercise, and becoming a better steward of time, and all the gifts of our lives.  Thank you.
3) for all the gifts of a community, both at work, online and in the everyday, and at the schools and home.  Thank you.  

Be More Thankful, not Less

I wrote this yesterday, but it wasn't finished until today.  So as part of Thanksgiving weekend, you get to partake in the meal the day after the meal and the words I would wish to all who bother to read my blog a day late as well.   Happy Thanksgiving to each of you, even if you do not celebrate it. Thanks for being here, for being part of my life in whatever manner, and for all the blessings of life.  Thank you.  

Some people found it hard to celebrate this national holiday this year, the same way people struggle with prayer when things are hard, or refuse to push through an exercise or writng block. However, it is when we through an act of the will, engage in these activities, that we reveal whether we do something for the feeling or for the love of the thing itself.   So be more thankful, not less. 

Every year, we’re reminded to cultivate gratitude for our lives in this country where we hold greater rights than most people have throughout history. It doesn’t mean we’re perfect. It doesn’t mean we’re more virtuous, to a person or as a nation, only that we have been and continue to be blessed to live here.

We are.  We are. We are. We are.  That’s what we give thanks for, for being part of this great experiment, with all of its wrong turns and errors. We give thanks just the same for the privilege we hold, to be free, to vote, to have a system designed in theory though often not enforced or revealed through our actions, to promote each of us to fulfil our lives without fear of repression by the government. 

Thanksgiving is a time to remember this fact. Today, we give thanks for all that we have because we know, it wasn’t always thus, and isn’t now for so many.  We owe those who don’t have what we have today and every day, at least the obligation of gratitude for the blessings we hold and take for granted. 

Today, we have family because today we remember we are a family; with crazy uncles and cousins we don’t always see eye to eye with, with people we should know better, and people we sometimes feel we know too well. Today, we remember what holds us together, even as we work to remove, amend or heal what sets us at odds.  The giving of thanks in our hearts marked by a feast doesn’t mean we don’t have plenty of problems; problems which require solving, problems which seem intractable, problems which seem like they shouldn’t exist anymore, and yet do.  The thanksgiving is to remind us of where we’ve been and where we’re trying to go.   

Happy Thanksgiving. 

Small Success Thursday

If there is a poison to motherhood and parenting, and to life, it is ingratitude. It robs everything of the emotional pleasure that should have been there, and robbing everyone else if they know, of the joy they’d had in giving.  So come fight that poison with sweetness and light, by celebrating Small Success Thursday!

Catholicmom.com Today

Please come join us over at Catholicmom.com for Small Success Thursday!

Lent can be a time when we focus only on our sins and when we do that, we miss the mark.  The point of stripping away the world is to notice God fills what we'd cluttered.  The point of recognizing our own sinful nature, is to recognize how much we need God's mercy, and to rejoice we have access to it, if we but seek and ask.   So stop today, and count your blessings.  Count them on a rosary and you will discover, if you're willing to cultivate your heart with gratitude, you will run out of beads before you run out of reasons to say "Thank you." and at the end, your heart will feel so full, it will feel like Christmas and Easter and your birthday, the joy must spill out.

If you still don't feel like going, if you are still struggling with "It's winter. It's Lent. I'm tired. There are 1000 things to do and I don't feel like doing them..."  go here for true refreshment of spirit, because this is what it means to discover God's love is all.