Count Your Blessings
Count Your Blessings
One of my all-time favorite hymns is “Count Your Blessings.” The song urges us to look at the good that we have in our life instead of the bad, especially in times of difficulty. More than one psychologist has noted that those who maintain such an attitude have an appreciably better quality of life even when experiencing personal grief as the result of the death of a loved one. This does not mean that those who so live, put their head in the sand and ignore their “problems”; rather, it means that those “problems” are not assigned the undue place of personal identity formation. In other words, “I may have problems, but my problems don’t define me.”
What does define such an individual is the constant recognition of God’s blessing in his life. It is a choice to focus on the positive and not allow the negative to overwhelm the soul. God made our bodies to respond to such focus too. When we think about good things, a completely different set of physiological responses occurs in the body. We just interpret this as “feeling better,” but it is much deeper than that. It is the supersession of the spirit over the flesh (Galatians 5:22-26). It is God working in us (Philippians 2:13). And with that we receive wonderful peace that defies explanation (Philippians 4:7).
There is much we can do to help ourselves live well. Jesus said, “The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly” (John 10:10). Thieves come in many shapes and sizes, and the worst one is the one that we let in the front door. Let’s resolve to trust in God and not in self.