⇒ MY GRATITUDE PAGE
► Gratitude Requires Me To Make A Daily Inventory
As Bill Sees It page 37 says " One exercise that I practice is to try for a full inventory of my blessings and then for a right acceptance of the many gifts that are mine - both temporal and spiritual. Here I try to achieve a state of joyful gratitude. When such a brand of gratitude is repeatedly affirmed and pondered, it can finally displace the natural tendency to congratulate myself on whatever progress I may have been enabled to make in some areas of living. I try hard to hold fast to the truth that a full and thankful heart cannot entertain great conceits. When brimming with gratitude, one’s heartbeat must surely result in outgoing love, the finest emotion that we can never know.
See the following websites for help in making this full inventory:
Spiritual Gifts Inventory https://goo.gl/4FSh9G and https://goo.gl/i5kM3u
Gratitude Quiz https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/quizzes/take_quiz/gratitude
How Grateful Are You? http://happierhuman.com/how-grateful-are-you/
► Gratitude Releases Me From Bondage
Gratitude has released me from a self-imposed bondage I placed upon myself by believing that I had to be perfect in all my actions. Perfectionism expressed itself in several forms was a prison from which I have barely escaped with my life. Though it has taken almost a lifetime, my life now has changed for the better since I adopted an attitude of gratitude and began to live proactively rather than reactively. I finally realized that I would never be perfect in this life but that I could reach for excellence and could choose to follow the desires of my heart. I have learned to take better charge of my life rather than settling for what had always been or what others thought I should be. I soon began accepting that good was coming to me everyday and in every way as a birthright and that I no longer had to live mired down in my own negative stinking thinking. I am in debt to many people whose insightful thinking and exemplary lives have given me the inspiration and understanding I needed to think more clearly and thus embrace and enjoy a better life. Some of those people are noted on this page. I hope their words or their websites will inspire you as they have me.
Jesus said, "I am come that ye might have life and have it more abundantly." (John 10:10) I believe that gratitude is the key that unlocks the door to that abundant life. One day at a time I live the life I have always desired.
Melody Beattie's writing has strengthened my resolve and determination to live my life with an attitude of gratitude. She writes, "Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow. . . Gratitude isn't a tool to manipulate the universe or God. It's a way to acknowledge our faith that everything happens for a reason even if we don't know what that reason is. . . I trust so much in the power of the heart and the soul; I know that the answer to what we need to do next is in our own hearts. All we have to do is listen, then take that one step further and trust what we hear. We will be taught what we need to learn.”
Aryana Grantham, life coach and spiritual mentor, wrote "You are all you need to be to do all you need to do. There is no drug, or even natural substance that is more powerful than the human mind. When you decide you are the main player to your own destiny, you will be able to play your role in the world better than you can play any other thing. We get to choose how we evaluate ourselves and how we use our energy and we do not need to rely on others in the present or the past. This fact is possible because you, like every human on this planet is the true child of God and our God, the creative source, does not play favorites with his children. We cannot separate ourselves from the legacy of this fact, nor can we separate ourselves from the power within, except by choosing to use self doubt, self distrust, self discrimination or self anything negative."
Another of my favorite motivators was Zig Ziglar. The following quotes from his writing have made a great difference to me: "You are what you are and you are where you are because of what has gone into your mind. You change what you are and you change where you are by changing what goes into your mind." "You can get anything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want." "It's your attitude not your aptitude that determines your altitude."
The attitude of gratitude has been most helpful to me as I have learned to live it. John Fitzgerald Kennedy once wrote, "As we express our gratitude, we must never forget that the highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to live by them". The Star Wars Jedi Master Yoda says, "Try not. Do or do not, there is no try."
Michael Lee is a persuasion expert, professional copywriter, and known by many as a "self-improvement guru." You can watch videos on certain very helpful topics by going to his video webpage.
Self-Help, Inspirational and Motivational Videos
You can also benefit from Michael's audios and articles.
Self-Help Audios, Self-Improvement Articles and Advice
Chris Cade always strives to serve the highest good by empowering people through heart-based endeavors. His websites have affected me so positively that I am, with his permission, passing along his efforts to you. Reading from his website Spiritual Short Stories will uplift you and fill you with an attitude of gratitude. It does so for me, everyday!
Together we can empower the world!
Steve Brunkhorst recommends that you Renew Your Spirit and Reach a Higher Level of Personal and Professional Achievement...With his permission, I commend his beautiful site to you as a quiet and powerful space for Living Life Fully.
http://www.livinglifefully.com/flo/flocreatingandliving.htm
► Gratitude Frees Me to Serve
My faith-based ministry [ http://brotherjohnpoetminstrelmuse.webs.com/ ] follows the scripture Ecclesiastes 11: 1 "Cast thy bread upon the waters; for thou shalt find it after many days." I believe in Blaise Pascal's definition that "faith is the great wager of betting one's life on God!" That is what I have tried to do in my life - literally throw myself into service for others, trusting that God with be there! I particularly like the quote: "Do all the good you can, By all the means you can, In all the ways you can, In all the places you can, At all the times you can, To all the people you can, As long as ever you can." This quote is often attributed to John Wesley, though Methodist scholar Kevin M. Watson says that Wesley was misquoted. The sense of the quote is in harmony with my belief that God expects us to be anxiously engaged in many good causes, doing many things of our own free will and helping each other when, where and as often as we can. I do trust in the Lord's provisions for me.
God has blessed me richly and has spared my life at my birth and many times during my life from accidents, illnesses and serious infections. I am forever grateful for God's grace. Early on I mistakenly believed that I must serve others to buy the space I occupied in the world not realizing that my Lord Jesus Christ had purchased that right for me by willingly going to the cross. My gratitude has overflowed since I accepted that fact and it has freed me to be of service to others for all the right reasons.
► Gratitude Challeges Us To Give & To Help
“Two kinds of gratitude: The sudden kind we feel for what we take; the larger kind we feel for what we give.” ~Edwin Arlington Robinson
"Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it." ~William Arthur Ward
"At times our own light goes out and is rekindled by a spark from another person. Each of us has cause to think with deep gratitude of those who have lighted the flame within us." ~Albert Schweitzer
Please join me on the Hunger Site for these free ways to help those in need.
The Hunger Site is the original click-to-donate site created in 1999 that gets sponsorship from advertisers in return for delivering users who will see their advertisements. The Hunger site encourages visitors to click a button on the site, once per day, asserting that each unique click results in a donation "equivalent" to 1.1 cups of food. The Hunger Site is not a charity; it is a for-profit corporation which donates the revenue from its advertising banner to selected charities. Currently, these are Millennium Promise, Food Recovery Network, Partners in Health, Feeding America and Mercy Corps.
OUR CLICK TO GIVE™ SITES
Source: http://brotherjohnpoetminstrelmuse.webs.com/gratitude