How to Harvest Your Blessings {30 Days of Gratitude, In the Middle, FOR the Middle}

Everywhere I look these days, I see evidence of a great "gathering in".  Piles of pumpkins, heaps of gourds, fragrant apples everywhere.  Even the squirrels in my back yard are fat with the blessing of the harvest, having gathered the acorns that fall in abundance from my neighbor's oak tree.  Three hydrangea bushes are waiting for me to harvest their scores of dried, billowy blossoms for use in my holiday decorating.

But how do you harvest the heart-crop that flowered, then fruited in the unseen inside of you?  How do you gather in what was grown in the soil of the soul?

You harvest with gratitude.  Gratitude is the threshing machine of all things spiritual - it is the mechanism by which we extract both our blessings, and the seed for our next harvest.

Gratitude plucks the great, round gourds of harvested promise.  Gratitude heaps the blessings into piles and piles of joy.  Gratitude gathers the grasses into great bundles, and looks wonderingly across the fields, mound after mound after mound of all God has given...

...in this way, too, "the harvest is plentiful, the laborers are few."  We each one have been abundantly blessed, but we won't know until we gather the blessings in, through the labor of conscious gratitude.