Thankful

This weekend most of the people in our home group were busy, and it ended up just being all the single girls, minus one.  Rather than have someone host, we decided to go out to dinner, and it ended up being an impromptu girls' night out.  It was wonderful, and exactly what we needed.  We had dinner at a rooftop cafe downtown, ice cream from a place around the block, and then walked to Andrea's apartment to hang out for a bit. 

Lovely ladies, lovely view, lovely day!

The topic of the night was gratitude.  Several of the girls have been reading books or doing studies on gratitude, and they shared the things they'd been learning.  Among them was that it's not enough to simply enjoy the good things in life, but we need to turn that into praise for the One who gives them.  We delved into the hard question of how we're supposed to give thanks in all circumstances, even bad ones.  We also talked about naming our blessings (instead of a generic "Thanks for all you do for me") and going beyond the big, obvious ones.  It's important to notice and thank Him for all the tiny things, to develop a general attitude of gratitude and praise. 

In honor of this, I thought I'd make a list of some of the little blessings I've noticed in my life the past few days:

• It's been warm enough for me to eat my breakfast on the balcony the last two days.
• It's also warm enough to wear skirts again!
• The 4th grader who spontaneously hugged me on her way to my class
• Someone put a sponge (to be used as an eraser) in my classroom at the elementary school.  In a school where every classroom has a smartboard, it's impossible to find an eraser for the one chalkboard.  I've been tearing paper out of a notebook. 
• The coffeeshop/elevator music version of "Gangnam Style" that was playing at the cafe where we had dinner.
• Typos/mistranslations in menus:
  
• The taste of clean, cold water.  An everyday occurance, but not one I usually pay attention to.
• Lightbulb moments with the kids in kindergarten
• I haven't had a mosquito in my room for several days now.
• My preferred bus pulling up to the bus stop just as I walk up (with open seats)
• The babushka standing on the corner selling individual portions of nuts wrapped in paper.
• The fact that the paper turned out to be an unused worksheet from some English language class!  :)
  

All told, that's a lot of blessings for just a few days!  And I know there are more that I'm not remembering right now.

So here's my question for you (didn't see that one coming, did you?  It's an interactive blog now! :) )- How has He blessed you lately, in big or small ways?