Appreciation is Back!!!

I have a sore back. No surprise to my friends there. Continuous whinging and manipulation for another back rub are a staple diet for those in my circle of friends. Of course me being the selfish person that I am, I never give them back.

What I have at the moment is a bit more than the ordinary sore back that I usually carry around because of the physical nature of my job,(Or does it carry me around?.. anyway..). This one is apparently a "chronic back fatigue". Thankyou for that apt description Mrs Physio. Kind of like a long term build up of back badness. I have been experiencing varying degrees of discomfort throughout the day, for the last three weeks or so. The pain ranges from a mild throbbing all the way up to pins and needles down my legs, sharp pains that make my eyes water and I have fallen over a couple of times when moving around. Coupled with my prideful stubbornness that refuses to ask for help, or take a sick day, this really is a pain in my etc... literally.

This got me thinking. We take our health for granted. We take many things for granted and we often don't realise how good we had it until it is gone. My back, for example, holds me up and basically enables me to do anything I want. Walk, run, lift, boogie-on-down, you get the point.

If I had understood and appreciated what my back was doing for me all these years, then I would probably have been much more careful with it and looked after it and been much more thankful for it. But because I abused it, took it for granted and hardly ever maintained it's health, its strength has been taken away from me and now I have to work really hard, in pain, financially etc, to restore it back to health.

As you know, if you ever bought a new car, it DEpreciates in value over time until it is worth a fraction of its original price. Imagine if you bought a new car and it began GAINING in value over time! Well that's what appreciation does. The more you stop taking something or someone for granted and start appreciating them, the more they feel their value increase. Every human is infintely valuable to God, but most of us don't feel that way all the time. By showing someone that you appreciate them, they can start to FEEL a bit more valuable. Like they deserve to. That's the power of appreciation.

What, or who, is there in your life that you take for granted? It is a far better thing to do to be thankful for them and to appreciate them, than to suddenly have a mess to clean up because you didn't put the effort in.

Oh, by the way, this wasn't a manipulative effort to gain more friendly back rubs. I am trying to stop doing that!;)