Friends

I wonder if, like me, you have a chore that you don’t particularly enjoy until you remember what it replaced? My last job of the evening is usually to unload the dishwasher and re-load it with the dinner things before setting it going and my first job in the morning is to unload it and put in the breakfast things. With six of us in the manse, and eight on alternate weekends, we are usually a two-loads a day family. This morning as I emptied it, I was grumbling to myself that I didn’t enjoy doing it and I suddenly remembered those early married years when we did all the washing-up by hand. The excitement of our first dishwasher has disappeared in the daily rhythms of life and now, loading and unloading it are just one more chore. I feel exactly the same about the laundry, even though as a child we lived without electricity for nearly ten years and had to hand-wash everything. Times change, and so does our perception.

This morning however, having caught myself in my negative thinking, I realised that I have fallen out of that old habit that my mother, and I expect many of our parents, taught us. That of “counting our blessings.” The old hymn that some of you may remember singing has gone out of fashion and perhaps so has counting the wonderful gifts in our lives.

When upon life’s billows you are tempest tossed

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost

Count your many blessings, name them one by one

And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

Count your blessings, name them one by one

Count your many blessings, see what God has done.

1 Thessalonions 5:16-18 tell us: “Rejoice always, pray continually, give thanks in all circumstances; for this is God’s will for you in Christ Jesus” and who can forget the beautiful lyricism of Irving Berlin’s song from White Christmas:

When I’m worried and I can’t sleep, I count my blessings instead of sheep

And I fall asleep, counting my blessings.

In this day and age of entitlement and knowing our rights, I wonder if it’s time to revive this spiritual habit?

God bless, Vicci