2 Nephi 11-16

15:12

15 And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine are in their feasts; but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his hands.

After working hard towards something or on something it is so easy to feel victorious and proud of yourself. Those are the time, at least for me, that it is easiest to forget the Lord, when really, I could have done nothing without him. Nothing.

Gratitude is one of the hardest things to conquer. It is easy to fall into these little slumps letting things like school or social status get you down. But if we all just took a moment every day to look up at the sky and contemplate how great the world really is, how different would the world be? We let ourselves get down with such trivial things but we are all so blessed it is dumb. If any of us sat down to write a list of the things we were grateful for, you would just find more and more things to be grateful for that you have been taking for granted and then never be able to stop, the list would go on forever. For example, when was the last time you were actually conscious and then grateful for the fact that you can swallow? Do you know how many times you swallow in a day? My dad works at a hospital and they were caring for a middle-aged women who had to learn how to swallow again. A speech pathologist had to come in and give her therapy sessions to teach how to learn to swallow again using about ten or so muscles in her neck she no longer knew how to control. Crazy right? To build on that with some personal experience, at the end up summer just before heading to college I got extremely sick. I was bed ridden for a month and eventually hospitalized because I could no longer swallow anything, not even my spit. Do you realize how many times you swallow, even just your saliva, in a day? Crazy. It may sound kind of funny, but one day I hope you have the unique blessing of losing the ability to swallow for a time so you can appreciate it properly.

After all that, I wish I could sit here and say I will never take swallowing for granted again. But I do, every day. I ate breakfast this morning and did not think twice about my ability to swallow things normally. Such a small small thing. There is not way you could really live a life being grateful for every tiny detail of your life, but how different would we all live if we could take all those minute gratitudes and transformed them into an attitude; an attitude we could live by day to day. If we could do that, man, how happy we would be.