Prayer Definitions Monday
This may be perhaps the easiest writing prompt I’ll 
ask you to do. I want you to look at your lifestyle and surroundings and carefully compose a list of 100 things to be thankful for. That is basically what a thanksgiving prayer is – – a prayer expressing gratitude. Irrespective of any religion we practice or choose not to practice, we all have a ton of things to be thankful for. Your job is to think about the things you have, including material possessions and abstract gifts. Write a thanksgiving prayer and include at least 100 things for which you are grateful.
Creative Idea Gal’s Thoughts
I had been tossing around in my mind the idea of giving myself a gratitude challenge for quite some time. The concept was easy, the execution a bit hard. The idea was to express thanks to people who had done extraordinary things for me and to limit myself to expressing that thanks in writing during the month of November only. I gave myself the challenge in November 2012 and rose above it, managing to write two different sets of daily gratitude blog posts.
My experiment resulted in 30 distinct blog posts expressing gratitude for people, places, and things in my neck of the woods, Alexandria, Virginia as well as 30 blog posts expressing gratitude for a variety of neat things.
Helpful Resources
For today’s prompt, I offer:
The Muslim form of prayers of thanks (du’a).
An interesting collection of interfaith gratitude prayers.
The Baha’i practice of saying grace at mealtimes.
Writing Prompt 034
- Step 1: Think about what thanksgiving means to you.
- Step 2: Reflect on the concept of thanksgiving as a prayer. What kinds of things would you be thankful for?
- Step 3: Compile a list of at least 100 things for which you are grateful in your own life. This should not be like a shopping list; it should be a thoughtful description of things to be thankful for and reasons for giving thanks. Write! Add definitions and personal perspectives. Suggestion: create your writing in the form of an opinion, essay, blog post, or social media blurb (status update, post, tweet).
- Bonus Step: If you own a blog and wish to share a link to the blog post that contains your response to today’s writing prompt, we welcome your permalink and encourage you to post it as a comment below!
Note: You get major brownie points for fleshing out your writing into rich subparts or adding historical perspectives to your writing.
Please be sure to leave comments about this writing prompt. We want to hear from you!
About the Author
Amanda M. Socci, J.D., is a freelance writer with 14 years of experience writing professionally. Socci currently cuts her blogging chops on her personal portfolio blog, the Creative Idea Gal blog, and on an online news site, Mount Vernon Patch. Inspired by Nina Amir’s Write Nonfiction in November writing challenge, she created a unique 10-month training program for Writenonfictionnow.com and Writenonfictioninnovember.com blog visitors.
Grab the badge of honor and upload it to your blog. Follow the prompts three times a week (M-W-F) right here.
You might be interested to know that Jews are supposed to say 100 blessings a day. Blessings are basically offerings of gratitude to God for anything and everything.
I once heard that gratitude was the strongest prayer anyone could offer.
Cami Walker has a lovely book about giving called 29 Gifts which asks you to give 29 gifts in 29 days. It’s not really about gratitude per say but goes along with the idea of writing to someone to tell them you are grateful for them and what they do for you.
Here’s a post where I mention 100 blessings a day and gratitude: http://purespiritcreations.com/var/www/html/public/2009/11/25/developing-an-attitude-of-gratitude-all-year-long/
Those are helpful resources, Nina. I’m sure our web visitors will appreciate your perspective on gratitude and blessings. Hopefully, they will also click on those resources as they tackle this writing prompt.