Almost a month ago I celebrated my 49th birthday.  Believe it or not I am really excited about this.  Some how or another it seems really wonderful to be looking forward to turning 50.  50 Years is a big deal.  To be alive for half a century, to have seen things change, for good and bad.  To change myself, for good and bad.  To have had the privileged and opportunity to live at all.  This seems like something I should celebrate, not dread.

Celebrate the fact that I am almost half a century old and still feel pretty young, most days anyway.  To look back over my life and know that I have been blessed in more ways than I can count.  To look forward into my life and know I have both much to learn yet and many things yet before me to get to do.  This year is the right time to both reflect and to start.  So that is what I am doing with this blog.

This blog will be for several things – reflections in gratitude and a vision of new goals, dreams and challenges.  I am going to share with you 52 things I am deeply grateful for that I have had bless my life.  Some will be obvious, some maybe silly and some probably hard, because all of life’s blessings are not pretty but that does not make them any less of a gift or reason to be thankful.  Each will be real moments of gratitude for me that my heart longs to share.

I am also going to write about several life goals laid out before me for this year and even the years that follow.  Those that the Lord  allows for me to do and be a part of.  This part will be sharing both the things that are going great on those goals, the success, and the epic failures and down right laziness that is a part of my life.  The reason being all are teachable moments that I know God uses to build and grow the life he has called me to live.

So this will truly be an on line public journal.  I will try to be honest and write from my heart and be as real as I possibly can be.  I don’t want to say just what I think needs to be heard or wants to be heard. Rather I want this to be a conversation I have with my God that if you choose to read and respond to great, if not then really I have the only audience I truly need; Adoni.

The title of this blog, it is a reflection of my life.  Not in a bad way, more the shabby chic kind of way.   All of us have lives that are journeys and most of those are at least some what tattered aren’t they?  But those rusty warn out spots those are the great life stories, the blessings in disguse, the mistakes that tought the best lessons.  And the heart in our gratitude.  I don’t think we can have any idea at all what being thankful really is unless there was loss and trouble and tatters leading up to it.  It is the pain that helps us understand the blessings.  We don’t even know we are blessed until we realize either what we could loose or what we have lost.  Then we also can see what we have been given and what we have yet to acomplish.  And to know there is a journey still up ahead, we are not done, we are not finished we are still walking a path to a really great wonderful life.

So that is my gratitude for the beginning of this journey.  I am so thankful the Lord gave me life; the good, the bad, the lazy, the stupid, the mistakes, the wins, the funny, the sad, the people, the places, the beauty, the old, the new, the seasons, the love, the loss, the dreams, the nightmares, and the adventure of a tattered journey.

Thank you Lord for life, thank you that you make it full!

Teresa – a traveler-