Count Your Many Blessings

Thursday, August 3

Count Your Many Blessings
By: Lori Ennis
 
"The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases; His mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning." Lamentations 3:22-23 
  
Have you ever started to clean something out and wondered why on earth you keep so much stuff?

I sure have. I currently am, actually, as I purge and prepare to pick my life up and start it over, again, halfway across the country.

Throwing out and packing up years of my life into boxes is hard. And it also makes me wonder why we realize how attached and endeared to things we are most often when we are about to let them go.

Do you get what I’m saying? Doesn’t it feel like we appreciate so much more of what we have when we’re about to lose it?

Why is that? What about leaving behind what we ‘love’ makes us realize how there was so much more that we ‘loved’ than we may have realized?

I think it’s because letting go of things is often hard. Loss is hard. It hurts our hearts. It makes us shift perspective as we see the blessing of everything we’d had.

So wouldn’t it be great to really appreciate what we have more while we still have it? I’m not talking about living in the clichéd 'here and now.' I’m talking about something even more basic—just the simple acknowledgment of the value of a friend’s smile…a home-cooked meal…the beautiful sunset over the water. His mercies never end; they are new every morning, and plentiful enough to recognize if we’d only do it.
 
If we start there, really relishing in those simple things, I think we’d start to see how great the bigger things in our lives are too. In counting our small blessings, all of them and purposefully, we won’t have to wait to pack our life up into boxes to be really grateful for everything we have.