Life Lessons from Sesame Street
Week 1: Count Your Blessings

I'm way excited about this new Spark series, so I think that I'll try to update ya'll on highlights from Wednesday night Spark.

We talked about how much easier it is to complain than it is to count our blessings. I joked about how my dad used to say to me, when I'd complain of a bad hair day or something, "at least you've got hair to complain about" or "at least you've got two hands and two feet" and blah blah blah. But there's truth to that, at least we do have a good and lovely life.

We talked about scriptures that tell us to rejoice in the day the Lord has made, and that his love endures forever and we are to be glad and rejoice in that. We talked about Romans 8:28 and how all things work together for good for those that love the Lord...so why should we ever have a bad day?

That said, we each created a Cactus of Awesomeness, on which we wrote awesome things in our lives. Then we talked about the prickleys- and that sometimes, we let the fear of awesome things going bad cause prickleys, or negative people and things cause prickleys, and stuff gets in the way of our awesome stuff being the first thing we talk about/encounter/lean on. We get caught in the prickleys first.

So, what do we do? We've got negative people, or our negative selves, getting in the way of simply rejoicing because of who God is. Stuff- prickleys- get in the way.

We need to get these prickleys out of the way- tell people to "stop putting prickleys in my Cactus of Awesomeness!" If we embrace a positive attitude and count our blessings, we can be the change, the prickley-less person, who doesn't let anything get between them and God.