Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

I think this wonderful duo of words isn‘t really used enough. It‘s turned into a pretty rare pair of words that doesn‘t really mean as much as it should. The real tragedy though, is that we really do have so much to be thankful for. We just don‘t realise it, or acknowledge it. I know that I don‘t say thank you enough. I don‘t genuinely and personally thank people as much as I could; as much as I should... So I wanted to use this post to firstly say thank you. Thank you and thank you again. Genuinely.

Thank you to each and every person that is reading this right now. Thank you for your time.

Thank you to anyone who has ever spoken a kind word to me. From those people that encouraged me when I was a familiar face in a familiar environment, to the people that came around me in the toughest of tough times.

Thank you to the people that took the time to get to know the ‘new kid‘. I've loved getting to know every single one of you.

Thank you to the people that never stop encouraging me, the people that never say a mean word, the people who put up with my mistakes and help me out when I‘m being really inconvenient.

Thanks to the brilliant people that look out for me to make sure I don‘t get in trouble or do anything stupid.

Thanks to the people that continue to challenge me to be the best I can be.

Thanks to the people that always, always, always have my back no matter how far apart we are. Thank you for caring for me.

Thank you to everyone that has ever annoyed me, told me off or got on my nerves. I've learnt a lot about who I am because of you. I love you guys the most of all and I hope you know it.

But there are few ridiculously important people that I can never thank enough. Firstly, the Big Man upstairs: God. He‘s given me such a wonderful life and I have no idea how I would survive if He wasn't always at my side. He has been with me through every single moment of every single day and I‘m honoured to live for Him.

Secondly, my Mumma and Daddy. These two people don‘t get thanked enough; my biggest fans and greatest heroes. They‘ve been there for me always and they will always be there for me. We scream at each other and laugh together too. We drive each other crazy, but I could never ask for better parents. So thank you, mum and dad.

You see, often we find ourselves sitting around and complaining about how tough our life is. We complain about what we don‘t have and what we want. It‘s so easy to list the things that we don‘t like and aren‘t thankful for, but it can be a lot harder to actually thank people and thank God for the things we do have. The fact of the matter is that thankfulness and gratefulness is a pretty hard skill to master. It‘s incredibly hard to be thankful in tough times and it‘s even harder to look back and realise the good that came out of tough stuff. But a lesson I learnt as a child, from a veggie-tales video, is that a thankful heart is a happy heart. No matter what‘s going on, no matter how low we feel, if we can be thankful, then we can be happy.

YOLO

Live like you were to die tomorrow, love like you were to live forever.

In life we get one shot. We have one chance to live the best, to speak our mind, to influence, to serve, to reach and to make a difference; and it's never the things that we've done wrong that we regret, but the things we never did at all.

Sometimes we put the unimportant things before things that can truly make a difference. We choose the easiest thing over the right thing and we fail to remember that one chance is all we have. Sometimes things will come our way and we pass opportunity by because we think that someone else will do it instead. We need to stop and seize the day- make the most of every opportunity and make the right decision at every choice. Life is precious so live it well; do what is right, not what is easy.

Maybe the most important thing that life will ever teach, is to pay it forward. Paying it forward means blessing others when someone blesses you; paying it forward means helping others because someone helped you; paying it forward means putting others before yourself and going out of your way to do something for someone else. I've always wondered, what would happen if everyone did something for someone else for no particular reason at all? Truly then we would be loving like we were to live forever.

As people we need to learn to speak now, to act now, to love each other with unconditional and undying love. We need to be the best people that we possibly can be and leave a footprint on the world. We need to live the best because You Only Live Once.

Forever Friends

Today I observed a prime example of friendship: two 6 year old boys- fighting. They were angry and frustrated at each other- annoyed that they weren't in agreement. They fought for around 20 minutes, and then they started kicking a ball around. How is it possible that their fight could so easily end?

Many times in friendships we fight. And many times we forgive and become friends again. Sometimes we promise that we will never, ever talk to each other again, we say "I hate you" to each other; but we secretly know, deep in our hearts, that those fierce promises will definitely be broken. We know that we will always be friends- not because we look alike, not because we live in the same town, not because we're both rich, not because we like the same things, but because we are tied together at the heart and because we have a special friendship that time and space cannot destroy.

I believe that true friends are those that can be together after years of not seeing each other and still be able to hang out like normal, friends are those that we never lose because they live in our hearts, they are the people that we can fight with and the people that we can promise never to talk to and then break those promises freely and fearlessly. True friends are made in the heart and are tied together at heart- because true friendship is when time, distance, victory, loss, money or health don't matter, because true friends are made in the heart.

Like Water on a Ducks Back...

The world is full of negative people- people that put you down, people that tell you you're worthless, people that say you can't succeed, people that let you know that they want to see you fail. We've all heard the phrase 'let it slide like water on a duck's back', but if you're anything like me, you would have never paid heed to this powerful statement.

Often in life we stop doing something that we love or are incredibly talented at, because somebody tells us that we can't succeed. Somebody plants a seed of negativity into us, and we let it grow instead of letting it slide like water on a duck's back. We need to somehow develop this ability to let negativity slide off us and let encouragement and positivity soak into us.

What if we all grew a shield to negativity and stopped allowing negative comments to enter our lives, what if we let it slide like water on a duck's back and didn't stop doing what we loved because of something that someone said? If we did that, we would have a strong, confident culture. We wouldn't have people that were unsuccessful because somebody said they couldn't do it. We would be successful, we would be everything we wanted to be. We would be positive people.

So be a duck and let it slide; because if something doesn't build you up, it's not worth letting into your life- because you are worth more than what someone thinks.

When the going gets tough...

'When the going gets tough, the tough get going' it says. Sometimes, life knocks us down, pulls us apart and beats us up. We fall and we can't seem to get back up again.

Life has a way of overwhelming us. It makes things tough for us, makes us hurt, cry, break and grieve. It gives us hard decisions to make, it seems to complicate things and stress us out- as if we aren't stressed enough.

The 'stuff' in life comes at us in waves. Sometimes it's quiet and the tides are peaceful and calm- everything is how it should be. At other times, there are raging currents, pulling us this way and that, tearing us apart, pushing us around- things are tough but we gotta keep swimming. The weird thing is that the harder we kick and the harder we try to get ourselves out of rough situations, the harder our life seems to get. We just have to keep paddling, keep a tame mind, don't stress and know that God has all things under control. 

In my opinion, I think that the hardest thing to do when you're in the middle of trouble is to let go- to give all our worries to someone bigger than us and to just trust God. Why? Because I believe that God totally controls our lives- He's got us in His hand- and somehow, in the midst of tragedy, we seem to think that it's God's fault that we're in a muck. 

So all I wanna say is keep going, keep swimming, keep paddling and just keep on keeping on...

Wishes....

So lately I've been thinking: where did the time go, where have the days gone... why is it so different now? Now that we're older, that we're more sane; smarter. Why can't we believe in angels anymore? Why can't we wish on stars, why can't we believe that wishes come true.

I always wonder when we lost the ability to believe in things like that. To make a wish, and then somehow believe that it'll come true. I used to wish on stars. I used to believe that the stars would tell God. I used to think that somehow, my wish would come true. I don't remember how it stopped. I don't remember one time when my wish didn't come true. I used to wish on stars so that someone else knew what was going on in my life too; so that someone could fix it; because I knew that I couldn't fix my situation, but maybe someone could. I don't know how I lost that faith, I don't how I managed to start thinking that no one wanted to hear about my thoughts, my feelings and my problems.

I think that this faith; the faith in people, the faith in love, the faith in peace and the faith that everything is going to be alright, is what keeps a smile on the face of a five-year old. They never doubt for a second, whether or not they'll have a friend at school today, or whether they're putting on too much weight, or whether their clothes are too unfashionable. They never doubt the fact that somebody loves them and that somebody cares for them, they put their everything into day-to-day tasks because they're never worried that their best is not good enough. they wish on stars, because they know that believing in the simple things is what keeps life from being complicated.