Participating in the #BeThankfulChallenge this month (post one thing you’re thankful for on Facebook/Twitter every day from November 1 – Thanksgiving Day) proved a couple of things to me.

• First, I find it much more difficult to be grateful–and positive about my life–than I would have hoped.  Some days, it was a struggle for me to come up with one…single…thing that I felt grateful for.  Okay, I could have taken the easy way out and said something like, “Today I am thankful for chocolate” (which is always true).  But when I tried to come up with something really specific to the day at hand, I often had to think very hard.
• Second, item the first says much more about me than it says about my life.  I have so much to be grateful for, daily, that it should be a struggle to narrow it down.  But I’ve realized that I tend to notice the stuff I’m not grateful for, the stuff that irritates me or hurts me or makes me sad, much more than I pay attention to the things I’m grateful for.

I want to change this about myself.  So I’m going to work on being more grateful for everything and less focused on what I lack and what didn’t go the way I hoped it would.  I will try to remember the counsel President Monson gave in his recent talk on gratitude: “If ingratitude be numbered among the serious sins, then gratitude takes its place among the noblest of virtues.”

It is unbecoming for someone who has been blessed as much as I have to feel somehow as if I have been deprived or disadvantaged.  Do I have challenges? Yes.  Do I have bad days?  Yes.  But in the balance, the good of my life far outweighs the bad.  I hope it will become easier for me to remember that, and to notice it in the details more often.