Miriam O. Ezenwa, PhD, RN, FAAN

Greetings, my people! On Week 6 of our series, Strategies for Strengthening your Core and your Will to Turn your life Around, I will discuss “Gratitude,” the sixth strategy I used to turn my life around. Here are important questions for us to consider. Today, did you give thanks for the favors, failures, and future opportunities in your life journey? Did you give thanks to all those “hands invisible to you”— farm produce pickers, sewage and electric plant workers, and scientists —who work tirelessly to make your life better? Do you curse when rain falls on you? Do you bless God for the blessings rain bestows upon your life?

Gratitude is an important attribute that warms the heart of God. Jesus even practiced it. Before He raised Lazarus from the dead, Jesus said, “Father, I thank you for hearing me” (John 11:41). Is there a reason that, we as humans should not give thanks everyday, just because …?

As I described in my previous post on The Strongest Me website (From Dreams to Visions with Endless Possibilities” https://www.thestrongestme.com/2019/05/29/from-dreams-to-visions-with-endless-possibilities/), “Unceasing gratitude is the key that unlocks your spiritual path so that you attract recurrent blessings. I have often observed in others and myself that, as a people, we do not give adequate gratitude for what we have received. Rather, we focus on accumulating more stuff without acknowledging God, the Creative Source from which the formless became formed, from which the immaterial became tangible, and from which the limitations transform into infinities. 

True gratitude is a three-step approach. First, we must acknowledge and give thanks for that which we’ve received and strive for ways to pay forward those blessings to benefit the less privileged amongst us. Second, we must give thanks for that which we did not receive. Acknowledge mistakes or obstacles you were able to avoid, as well as the lessons you learned from not immediately achieving what you desired. As a matter of fact, if you made a mistake or failed, give thanks for that too! Each lesson is a brick that builds towards that final goal. Third, we must be grateful for our current dreams, though not yet manifest. It is a gift and a privilege to have a meaningful dream, and we must show respect and reverence for it to grow into something more.”

Therefore, we must develop an attitude of gratitude to unlock blessings upon our lives.  We must also give thanks for all those people in various employments whose labor help to make our lives better. For example, those men and women who work hours on end under the hot sun to pick the fruits and vegetables that we, conveniently buy from markets or grocery stores around the world deserve our thanks everyday. The men and women who work in sewage and electric plants to ensure that our homes run smoothly deserve our thanks everyday. Those scientists scattered around the world searching for immunizations and cures for various illnesses to better humankind deserve our thanks everyday. Giving thanks for those hands invisible to us, who, nonetheless, make our lives better, put us in the positive vibrational state that attracts more things in our lives for which we can be grateful.

If you have not made the practice of gratitude a daily routine in your life, I would suggest that you start and judge for yourself.

I know you can do it!

I would love to hear from you about your success with your attitude of gratitude. How did it help you turn your life around?

I will connect with you again soon to discuss the seventh strategy I used to turn my life around — Giving. I reserved this strategy as a second bonus to you. Therefore, I excluded it from the first five strategies I mentioned in my introduction to this series.

I wish you strength, always!

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