The following words were originally published for the Monday Club— a weekly dose of encouragement and hope sent straight to your inbox. I’d love for you to join the club!

You’re in the weeds. You’re in the thick of it. 

You live your life– second by second– so it’s impossibly hard to take a moment to step back and survey what is right in front of you. The goodness. The things you are learning, even when it is hard. All the pieces of your life.

But maybe you should. Maybe you and I should step back more to see just how much we’ve been blessed and count it out loud.

Ann Voskamp writes, “Gratefulness isn’t hard. Forgetting to be grateful is what makes life hard.” 

Now I’m not a gratitude expert but I have been practicing long enough to tell you that gratitude multiplies. The more you say “thank you” for the little things, the more you find things to be thankful for. I honestly believe God knows this about the practice gratitude and that is why the idea of “thanksgiving” is scrawled all over the Bible. Because thanksgiving is a gift for us. It causes explosions in our own hearts. It is our eyes that begin to shift and our plates that begin to become more full when we start to savor the good all around us.

 …

I want to write to someone specific today. I know you’re out there reading and I wish you and I could be grabbing coffee right now. I wish you could hear the tone in my voice, the concern I have as I say this:

You have to stop wishing for someone else’s life.

You have to stop spending the best hours of your day scrutinizing what you’ve been given and comparing it to others. This way of living doesn’t serve you. It doesn’t make your heart expand in any way. Actually, it does the opposite. It shrinks you. It makes your spirit shrivel up. The more you look at someone else and think, “I want what they have,” the more you grow in discontentment and that shade of gray spreads across all areas of your life.

It’s easy to romanticize what other people have. It’s easy to want it for yourself. But progress is not a spectator sport. You don’t walk into new things by sitting on the sidelines and avoiding the work.

The hard road is deciding that there are some things in your own life that need to be changed. That you are tired of these old ways. That you want to walk into new things. That road is bumpier and rockier. It is the unpaved road that everyone knows about but few take it because, sadly, they become comfortable following the crowd and chasing after what other people have.

You could say, “Oh, I’ll be thankful when I get _____________ or when I become _____________ or when I meet _____________. But it’s dangerous to wait on circumstances before you start cultivating a heart of gratitude. Start today. Start this second. Being grateful for your surroundings and imperfect circumstances does not mean you have to stay right where you are– it just means you are not living with your finger on the ”pause” button until things change. 

Take the hard road. Make the small change. Decide to stop looking at other people’s lives as competition and choose to be grateful to them for being a source of inspiration. Stop cutting yourself off from the kind of life you want to live and just start building it day by day. Brick by brick. 

Change is bound to be slow-moving. All good and lasting change is. But you can enjoy the road from point A to point B. You can marvel at the way it feels to lay the bricks down on a better foundation and a more solid future. You can rejoice over who you’re becoming and how you’re growing. You can show up each day and say, “Thank you for the bricks.” 

Yes, yes. Thank you for the bricks.