Find Gratitude Scene. Hit Play.

My wife is doing a 50 day reset—which really just means she’s toying around with different habits and trying to optimize her health (in all the ways). I love her for it, because when she makes a plan BOY does she stick with it. She has a paper in her garage gym with 50 bubbles and there will not be a single bubble that gets skipped if I had to venture a guess.

As opposed to me—well, when I do similar things I download a habit tracker app on my phone, add in things, and progress is less, umm—linear. I showed her my app recently and she put her hand over her face and said “I could never…”

Different strokes, as they say.

Anyways, she was telling me about one of the things on her goal list recently. The concept is to, at the end of your day, pick out one moment of your day that you were grateful for, find some quiet, and relive that moment in your mind like a movie scene.

Replay the whole moment, let it simmer in your mind, and thank God for it. For this beautiful scene in an ordinary day.

I asked her how it was going, and she raved about it. How helpful it is specifically to end your day like that.

I have been thinking about it since. Because in a way, we are all filmmakers when you stop to think about it. We can’t help it, we are storytellers at heart.

But there are two distinct categories of things:

• One, there is the bare facts and happenings of our lives—the characters around us, the plot points. While…

• Two, there is the editing. The slicing and dicing of footage. The narration we assign to a day or a year or a life. Some stuff gets brought to the surface, and other stuff hits the cutting floor with the other forgotten moments.

And let me tell you, the editing makes a big difference. I’ve seen people who—while living the exact same life—move the vibe of their film significantly.

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a person who rehearses the worst or most upsetting parts of their day while winding down is going to have a different outcome than a person who intentionally finds a bright spot in their day and relives it while thanking God for it.

Which brings me to another question: why, upon hearing this incredibly helpful idea, didn’t I immediately, you know—do it? Or at least add it to my habit tracker app to do sometimes—much to the dismay of my perfectionist wife?

I think the answer lies in what a friend of mine used to say: Insight is not change. Insight often feels like change, but it is most certainly not. Change requires acting, through all the resistance outward and inward, on the insight attained.

Insight is free and feels good. Change is hard-won and gritty.

Add to that the reality that we’re not exactly short on ideas to improve our health in all the areas. The question of why don’t I read my Bible more or eat more protein could be subbed in. We are generally not short on insight today and have to do the work of discerning which things we genuinely need when the amount of possibilities could overwhelm someone living an actual life.

But I had another thought about the gratitude scene thing that unfolded in real life last night. Right before our kids’ bedtime, my 12 year old daughter asked me to go watch her do flips on the trampoline. I was tired and ready to get things moving along but I had the sense to know she is growing up before my eyes and half the time is already too busy or cool for me and this is one of those things I should absolutely say yes to.

So we sauntered out into the still oppressive July heat and I sat down and watched her try to get something called “a full.” She only got a half, which was plenty impressive to me. Then she asked me to play a song so she could show me a dance routine she made up. She said the song is called “Unwritten” and that it was from “the olden days,” which made me laugh. Afterward she did another routine to the song “Cotton Eyed Joe” and then I clapped for her performance.

And the whole time I was watching her, I was thinking, “This is it. This is the moment I would replay if I was doing the gratitude scene thing!”

And I realized that, at least for me, sometimes the reason I don’t notice those moments more respectfully in real time is that there are often other things in the scene.

Tonight it was all the things I need to do in our backyard. The grass that needs to be cut. The large limbs I chopped down that were overtaking our fence that I have to find some way to haul off to save paying someone to do it. The repairs on the trampoline we bought during Covid that my kids have lovingly almost destroyed. The half of our grass that is dead because of said trampoline.

All of those things were there, vying for my attention, while my stunning little girl was doing flips in her pajamas. But when I realized I was in the scene none of them mattered at all.

Most of the time, it’s something else. It’s the stress I’m bringing into the moment I suddenly want to soak up. The to do list, the thing I have to get to next, the difficult conversation from that day, the worries, the phone, the knot in my upper back, the whatever.

I don’t know if I will start doing the thing my wife is doing. We will see if it makes it onto my app and how many bubbles I miss if so. But what I do know is that I want to get better at making sure I notice those moments in daily life when they happen.

To stop ever so briefly and announce to myself, “This is it—this is a moment you don’t want to forget. A moment that should make it into the movie, because it is screaming to you that this is the day that the Lord has made, and you should rejoice and be glad in it.”

Here’s to being better editors.