A Beautiful Day

This morning I happened to notice this quote on the top of my calendar:

"Give every day the chance to become the most beautiful day of your life." Mark Twain

That really struck a chord with me today. I am a lover of beauty and I love having beautiful days. So what makes a day extra beautiful to me? How can I give this (and every day) a chance to be a beautiful day? Here are some things that I came up with that I think help in making days beautiful for me...

• Starting my day with Prayer and time in God's word. This gives me proper focus and peace to go through my day. I believe this leads to beautiful days more than anything else. Part of my prayer each morning when I rise is that the Holy Spirit would work mightily in me and that God would give me the strength that I need for this day. As I read God's word I am looking for insight in how I can more closely follow God's will for my life. 
• Keeping my eyes open to all the gifts of beauty that God has sent into my life that day. Sometimes I am good at noticing and thanking God for these things and sometimes I am not. The beautiful days in my life are the days that I do a good job of noticing. I like to actually write a list each day of things I am thankful for but the noticing and saying "thank you" needs to go far beyond that one list in the morning. The pictures below are a few of the beautiful things that I have noticed and thanked God for this month.
• Trusting God even when it is hard. There are days that are hard. We might hurt physically or emotionally - whatever. But when I surrender to God and go ahead and trust through my tears that day becomes a beautiful day to me.
• Having times of truly fellowshipping and enjoying the company of others. When I truly take the time to listen to others and learn a little of their story I am so incredibly blessed. Those are beautiful times for me. I am also blessed when others listen to me and I can share a little of my life with them. I have had so many of those beautiful times just lately - I am so Thankful to God for that. I am not always good at listening. Sometimes I think myself to busy. Sometimes I just get to thinking about something else while somebody is talking to me. This is something I am working on. God is so patient with me! A couple of surprise incidents of this lately that I truly enjoyed was last Wednesday I met our AirBnB guest who was from Germany and she and I ended talking for 2 hours. Then on Sunday a new neighbor who I had tried to go meet a couple of times (I left notes as she wasn't home), came by and we had a great time getting acquainted. 
• "Praying through your day" was a phrase I heard while out at Nationwide Youth Roundup in July. It is basically the idea of praying without ceasing but it seemed a little more feasible. :-) I have been working on doing this and it is a huge blessing. I still have a long way to go in making this my life completely but with the Holy Spirit's help I believe it will happen. The idea is to invite God into every conversation and activity that you do, to keep a running conversation with Him throughout your day. This truly can lead to beautiful days!
• Fulfilling God's purpose for my life. There are things that God has blessed each one of us with, gifts and desires that He has given us to serve and bless others with and to Honor Him with. When I use the gifts that He has given me to the best of my ability I feel fulfilled and that makes for a pretty beautiful day. For me that often means doing something with music, flowers, adventuring, creating things or spending time with people (and for me I generally prefer to do any of that while spending time with people too). For you I am sure the list is much different. God created you with just the gifts and desires that He wants you to have. 

Those are some of my ideas in how to have beautiful days. I would love to hear your thoughts on this as well in the comments section!

Some of the beauty that I found in my days this August....

Produce from our garden - as weedy and messy as it is God still blesses us abundantly!

A deer waiting patiently by the roadside. Megan and I had fun watching it.

I had a lovely time driving along Lower Red Lake while making a flower delivery last Saturday. This picture doesn't do it justice.

Fun architecture while exploring Stillwater, MN 

A beautiful Netta on the bank of the St. Croix River.

Theo, Anna and Gigi were my other beautiful companions on that outing.

It was so neat to get to spend a little time fellowshipping with Wayne and Betty when we happened to be in the Twin Cities at the same time.

I always love spending time with these lovely ladies - Anna and Margaret (above) and Christy with Me (below)

My beautiful Megan enjoying some very attractive desserts from Cossettos.

We got to see my niece Beatrice at her job at Cossettos. Megan and I loved getting to explore that beautiful building a little bit and pick from the many delicious and beautiful options of desserts. Beatrice isn't working there for long as soon she is headed to Pakistan to help with mission work and I am super excited for her in getting to do that!!

So many beautiful things about this picture... This is a small portion of our church group - people who love the Lord and they love and care for one another. We are continually working to do that better. In this picture we were preparing gifts to give out in our community to spread the message that God loves them and that we care about them too. Several of these girls went with me last week to go and invite people that live near the church building to come to an event that we were planning. I was so blessed by their eagerness and cheerfulness.

One of the Crazy Olympic games that we had at our church picnic. It was fun for me to get to lead those games and for so many to get involved and enjoy participating.

Berry picking amidst the wildflowers. So many gifts from our Creator. Sometimes it is hard to grasp just how many He gives us each and every day!

These very neat and interesting little rosettes were growing on the rose bushes where we were picking. I have spent a lot of time out in the woods and fields and don't remember seeing this before. A pretty lovely gift that we enjoyed that day.

My beautiful sister Martha picking berries amidst the wildflowers. 

A bouquet from a wedding last weekend. I feel incredibly blessed to get to do the work that I do. God truly has made my life beautiful.

 I hope you have a beautiful day!!!