Name your blessings one by one

“Count your many blessings,” the old song says, “name them one by one.” It seems the “common blessings” of life—family, friends, home, health—are the most frequently overlooked. It helps to realize that no blessing is just for the moment...its forever. Blessings “keep,” and when difficult times come, we can remember the ways God has blessed us in the past, being confident He will do the same in the future.

One man who understood this truth wrote a letter to a teacher who had taken special interest in him years before. This was her reply: “Dear Willie: I cannot tell you how much your note meant to me. I’m in my 80’s and live alone in a small room, lonely like the last leaf of summer, lingering behind. You’ll be interested to know that I taught school for 50 years, and yours is the first note of appreciation I have ever received. It came on a cold, blue morning, and it cheered me as nothing has in many years.” He got so excited by her reply that he wrote another letter of thanks, this one to a friend some distance away who had lost his wife. He received this letter in return: “Dear Will: Your letter was so beautiful, so real, that as I sat reading it in my den, tears fell from my eyes—tears of gratitude. Then, before I realized what I was doing I rose from my chair and called her name to show it to her, forgetting for a moment that she was gone. You will never know how much your letter has warmed my spirit; I have been walking about in the glow of it all day long.”

How long has it been since you have shown appreciation for the common blessings in your life? You have carried them in your heart for years. Isn’t it time thanksgiving for them spilled out and blessed someone else?