How to Write Messy, Right-Now Gratitude
Let’s talk about life. How it rarely fits into tidy categories. Unruly questions peek from our pockets. Slices of life jumble, disrupt. We’re taut as the line for limbo, bent like a twist tie. Out of place. In between. Maturing, becoming through both the grind and groan.
In the mishmash of our actual lives, gratitude seems etheral and out of reach. How do we contain it in neatly penned lines as if we know the exact line between gratitude and sorrow? How do we put words to waiting, wondering, wishing?
Often we don’t, or at least for a long time, I didn’t. I wanted my gratitude journal to swell with beautiful cursive and elegant lines. Thought it needed to look perfect from the surface and up close. Authentically say what was deep inside.
So I’d write sporadically. Take a gratitude challenge. Vow to stay consistent. Guilt myself when I didn’t.
Write a Messy Gratitude List
If you relate, here’s permission to write a messy gratitude list. With blotted lines and tear smudges and misspelled words and illegible print. Go ahead and write it raw-edged and uncertain. Offer it with the question mark at the end.
I could tell you there’s science behind the positive effects of gratitude. Show you story after story in this series of broken lives and hopeless situations turned around. Unlikely tales of redemption. God pursuing hearts restless, anxious, shattered, ashamed.
But to truly understand how a life built around thanks shifts the script, you’ve got to give it a try. Quiet your inner critic, perfectionism, shame. Write anyways.
Pull the journal from the cobweby crevice. Borrow a notebook your kid didn’t need after all. Walk fast and word dump into the Notes app on your phone. Find a solitary spot and shout thanks at the top of your lungs. Whatever messy looks like, do that.
It will feel like a dangerous, brave feat. And it will be, because you’ll go against every should in the book. Fight your can’ts and haven’ts with bold hope. You’ll reach into the fissures of ache and alone and unknown and find there’s steady ground here, beneath the fog.
P.S. Jennifer Dukes Lee’s guided journal, Stuff I’d Only Tell God, will help you practice this messy, raw honesty. Highly recommend!
Love,
Begin Within is a series to inspire a year-round lifestyle of gratitude that will impact not only your own life, but the lives of your neighbors as well. Gratitude is a theme we talk about often around here because it ties so closely into other missional living rhythms. Practicing gratitude reminds to keep our hearts soft and expectant and our eyes open. Therefore, the more we embrace gratitude, the easier it becomes to truly see our neighbors and where we can join what God is already doing in our neighborhoods.
If you would like to contribute to Begin Within, you can find the submission guidelines here.
