365 Days of Grace and Gratitude
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 29/11/2023Last week when God kept nudging me to write about gratitude, I couldn’t shake the fact that gratitude needs to be more than something we practice on Thanksgiving–if we even pause our eating long enough to be thankful! I couldn’t help but think that our lives would look so much different if we started each day with five minutes of gratitude–that maybe instead of sitting down to watch the news or scroll through social media, we should sit with God for a few minutes and acknowledge what we’re grateful for, even if it’s just one thing. But, then I kept coming back to the parts of our lives that are trainwrecks–the parts that force us to think about the “worst-case scenarios” and what might happen in those, the chaotic parts, the parts that keep us teetering on the edge hoping we can find a way to hang on.
Choosing Gratitude
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 22/11/2023I have had the unfortunate privilege of being close–in proximity and relationship–to several individuals who lack gratitude. You might say they were a bit pessimistic. Being around these people was exhausting. It didn’t matter how much was going right, they could find the one negative in any and every situation. For example: We could be at dinner at a beautiful restaurant, and they would identify the one piece of steak that had a sliver of fat on it. We could be in the middle of a beautiful worship service, and they would call out the one item of clothing that had a slight wrinkle in it. We could be enjoying the sunshine, and they would complain about the heat. We could find a great sale, and they would find the one item not on sale and complain about the price. Have you been there?
Healing Through Thanksgiving: A Guest Post
By: Kristen Neighbarger Published on: 15/11/2023I stood in the middle of my kitchen staring out at my dining area and living room completely stumped as to how I would rearrange all of the furniture to get dinner seating for forty in what was starting to feel like an extremely claustrophobic space.
