Appreciation Story Log

About the app

Growth by gratitude

The benefits of gratitude are as Biblical as they are well-documented.

This online form was inspired by a document created by leaders at Lk10, a community of Christ-followers seeking meaningful spiritual growth and maturity through intentional interpersonal relationship and sharing.

Often times, Lk10 participants open their meetings by sharing brief appreciation stories to turn hearts to God with thanksgiving and to facilitate depth of sharing during the gathering.

We at TNT liked the process so much we decided to see if we could make the original paper document into a form through the wizardry of HTML, CSS and Bootstrap5. We learned a lot (how do you do vertical text?!) and are pleased with the results so far.

Technically speaking...

To troubleshoot the printing feature, we needed to populate the form with bogus random entries. JavaScript to the rescue! Our handy 'Random Fill' button fills each textarea with content via the value attribute (not innerHTML!). Try it out!

And that's not all!...

The original 'Random Fill' algorithm made each letter equally likely to be drawn. We decided to make the 'gibberish' more realistic by weighting the source alphabet by each letter's frequency. The more frequent the letter, the more likely it is to be drawn. It's still gibberish but at least it's more likely to get a real word now and then! Read about English letter frequency to learn more.

We're feeling appreciative!

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Day/Date

Title

Simple Appreciation Story (2-min)

1Briefly describe the situation:

2How did I feel in this story. List feeling words:

3How did I feel physically, in my body, during this story. List sensations and body location(s):

Typically...

4Describe your reactions. What's typical? atypical? How would I like to have responded?

Interactive Appreciation

5Thank God for the memory; 'Where were you, God?' 'How do you feel about this? me?

6Lord, what do you want me to know about this memory? About me? You? Anything else?

7How does this feel, to hear what you're hearing?

8Pick a word or phrase to 'title' the memory. This will help draw back the totality of the experience

Bonus

Tell one of these stories to someone today. Keep it to less than 3 minutes. As you tell the story, make eye contact, including feeling words, body sensation words and how you responded in the story. Not only will you make someone's day, you will also strengthen your bond with them and increase your capacity for emotional resilience in the face of stress and challenges.