Think Positive Thoughts

The theme for our Stake Relief Society conference in February was "You are Extraordinary". We had three workshops in which we focused on our awesomeness. Two of them, Service and Gratitude, had follow-up homework. For the Gratitude workshop, we were each given a Gratitude journal. Every day we have small things to be grateful for and when we see them, we give thanks, but we can forget them. So, we're supposed to record 3 things each day so that a week or a month from now we will remember those small moments of awesome.
I think there is divine inspiration in this little project, for multiple reasons.
1. This is just what I need; I recognize moments like this and then I'm so scattered that when I try to recall them, certain things seem to be veiled or something. I jot things down on random papers and receipts all the time. Maybe a cute little journal will keep it all in one place.
2. Sometimes you just need small reminders of blessings.
3. This is not the first time in the past few months that I've been asked to do this. It's not even the second...or the third.  This is the fourth time that various people, speakers, or lessons have suggested this activity.  I think at this point we could just do away with any descriptions of "still small voice" and just say someone is shouting at me to do this. So...I'm taking one of those 4 notebooks (yes, I got a notebook every time too) with me in my purse and I WILL write things down in it.
The service homework was given through a really fun and crazy sort of complicated activity. We were given note cards which were divided in half. On the top half, we wrote our name, contact information, and listed two acts of service we were willing to give.  This was slightly difficult to decide on service because our stake extends to multiple cities, hours away from each other. Simply writing, "watch your kids for a date night" wasn't exactly a simple fix. The two that I settled on were "send you a positive message each week for a month" and "bring you homemade cookies or cake."  Yes, the second one meant that I might possibly have travel in my future, but I was under a time crunch.
Once we wrote our services down, we listened to a story about the beginnings of Relief Society and how they were inspired to have a group to serve each other and the community to help bear one another's burdens. The story consisted of lots of "right" and "left" words, on which we would pass the note cards right or left. So, we never got our own card back; at the end of the story, the person holding our information got to choose which service they wanted. On the card that you were left with, you wrote down the information of the person who was keeping your service information so you knew to whom you were supposed to give service.  (This was the somewhat confusing part, because a lot of people were confused about what to write where and whose information was going where.)  I now have a card that says the name and contact info of the lady who is going to do service for me. On the bottom of that card, I wrote the name of the lady who has my card, so that I can do my service for her.
Lucky for me, she chose the positive message service and she'd rather have it emailed than sent in the mail.  So, as I try to come up with a positive message to send her each week, I will also post it here! Which means, if I actually stick to a good time frame, my blog should have at least four new post in the next month. Hopefully there will be others, but at least four posts, with a positive message. Awesome, right?! Now all I have to do is reign in all my thoughts about positivity and choose just one to start out with. Ready. Set. Go.