How Gratitude and Love Transform Our Struggles

• By candidasullivan
• July 28, 2026
• No Comments

Do you want a solution to your problem?

I have a solution-oriented mindset. If you give me a problem, my mind immediately starts questioning how to fix it and what possible solutions there are. I pray about it, meditate on it, and research it. 

Living with Amniotic Band Syndrome has taught me how to problem-solve and that there is more than one way to do things. While circumstances might knock me down, they don’t keep me there because I have a lot of experience overcoming them. 

Regardless of how dark or impossible it seems, I know a God who can change things. Nothing is impossible for Him. 

Therefore, when I am struggling, I can take it all to Him. God knows exactly what I need in every problem. He can remove it, lead me through it, show me what to do about it, or change the way I see it. While He might not remove my problem, He can change my thoughts about it. Some problems are beneficial for us. They have a very specific reason. And others are just obstacles, perhaps to slow us down or redirect us. 

If we accept our problems without making any effort to overcome them, it can leave us feeling hopeless, especially if we magnify them and make them seem bigger than our God. The more problems we accumulate, the deeper the hopelessness feels. 

Until life feels completely overwhelming, and we start dreading our days. 

Sweet friends, if we take care of what we can, we can leave the bigger, more impossible-looking problems to God. Sometimes we know what we should do, but we procrastinate. Then we carry the worry into the next day. 

As soon as my eyes opened this morning, I thought about the greatness of being alive. My heart thanked God for another day. I’m so thankful for my family and for getting to walk through life with them. I’m so thankful to be saved and to know such a powerful God. 

I believe that love and gratitude are the ingredients for a beautiful life. When we love God and others deeply, and truly appreciate every blessing, it changes things. 

Did you know that the enemy will try to get us to complain about our blessings? He does. If he can get us to put our blessings in the same category as problems, we will always have something to complain about. He will keep us in a continuous loop of misery.

I want to do the opposite. I want to fall so deeply in love with the life God has given me that the hard things can no longer close my eyes to the good. I want to have eyes that see and search for God’s blessings. And ears to hear His word. I want to walk every day in love and gratitude. 

Sometimes the solution isn’t getting a different life. It’s learning, with God’s help, to see the beauty in the life we already have while faithfully changing what needs to change.

There may be ten things wrong today, and a hundred things God is doing that are beautiful. The enemy wants your attention fixed on the ten, but gratitude decides to notice the hundred, too.

Will you join me in the search for all things beautiful and lovely, and blessings from God?