It's all About Hindsight

Happy Wednesday everyone!

I know I said this in my last post, but it's been hard to be thankful this year. I feel like I was doing Okay, I was getting to a better place and finding things to be so grateful for, keeping a good perspective when last Wednesday I felt like it was just a constant stream of bad news. For one Ticketmaster announced that if you don't have a vaccine or get tested for Covid 24-48 hours prior to a concert, you will not be allowed in. They have this whole health app set up and everything.

Then our local governor (who had promised everyone before the election that there would not be another shut down, we would stay at stage 5 and everything) got rid of stages all together and has decided to keep the mask mandate, limit social gatherings again and pretty much just make life hard for people. It's all very discouraging and worries me.

This post isn't about that, though. It's about thankfulness. I say all that to say though that when I found out about the Ticketmaster situation, one of the first things that came to mind was how thankful I was that I got to go see Twenty One Pilots last year. God's timing and His gifts are so perfect like that. My friend and I are huge fans (him probably more than me haha) and we had both wanted to go see them in concert for a long time, so getting to see them last year was a blast. We had both been excited to go again this year when they came back or around this area... obviously that didn't happen.

There are so many things (good and bad) that happen in life that I never think to thank God for until after the fact. Hindsight is a cool thing. It's amazing and a blessing to get to look back on the previous year or previous month or even previous week and realize that that concert or fun moment with friends or that vacation had been a gift from God all along. His perfect timing. This year especially has been a year of hindsight. I know there are lots of people (me included) who have been using it in a negative way. Thinking back on all the things we used to do, all the things we could do last year and comparing it to all the things we can't do now.

But I've realized that hindsight can be used in a positive way too. We can sit and compare and contrast what we did and didn't get to do last year to what we did or didn't get to do this year. Or we sit back and think wow... that thing I got to do last year, that thing that was like on my bucket list or something I had always wanted to do and got to do last year? What a blessing! That Twenty-One Pilot concert we had wanted to go to for so long and got to go to last year? What a blessing. We wouldn't have ever been able to see them in person this year, or potentially ever again. We actually got to go to a few concerts last year, and I am so thankful for that.

I guess it all comes down to perspective. Sometimes thankfulness isn't automatic, sometimes its a choice. In moments like these where the world feels so broken and crushing, it's a choice to stop, breathe and make a list of all the things you're thankful for instead. Find the little moments in the hard moments to be thankful for. Look back on the year before and think wow... thank you God for giving me an opportunity last year that I wouldn't have had this year. Sometimes choosing thankfulness feels like a chore and it doesn't make you feel all better. But I have to admit, it almost always makes me feel a little bit better. It sometimes can't erase the big hard stuff going on, but it can ease the pain, make life a little easier, even make it easier to lean on God and trust in Him.

The more I think about thankfulness the more I've realized how important it is for our relationship with God and even just for living in general. If you can't find anything to be thankful for then you're going to live a pretty miserable and sad life. Finding things to be thankful for is finding little things to be joyful about.

I guess what I'm saying is, I'm thankful to God for setting things up last year in the way He did because He knew this was coming. He wasn't surprised by 2020, and I'm thankful that I got to go to concerts and our local Christmas Market and do so many things that we couldn't do this year in 2019.

Today my list is of the things I'm grateful for that happened last year and this year:

• Getting to go to our local Comic Con in August 2019
• Going to the Christmas Market for the first time last December 
• Got to go see Into the Spiderverse with my little brothers at the start of 2019. Just being able to go see movies in general last year. 
• That my mom got to go see one of her favorite bands, Breaking Benjamin, in concert last year 
• The many lessons God pressed into me at the end of last year that I would need to get me through this year. 
• For an amazing start to the year. I got to hang out with friends a lot in January and February and do some fun stuff before everything went downhill 
• For a good pre-Covid birthday this year (March 9th, I was right on the edge and got very luck that I didn't have to have a quarantine birthday haha) 
• For God preparing me to move from our old neighborhood before we ever knew we were going to move at all 
• That we got to move into a house that better fits our family
• This week I'm thankful that my copy of Unlocked by Shannon Messenger came yesterday! 

What events/things from 2019 are you thankful for in hindsight?