Counting Blessings

"Concentrate on counting your blessings, and you'll have little time to count anything else."

---Woodrow Knoll

Counting our blessings is a spirit-filled principle. It opens up our souls to a world filled with the rich blessings of a loving God. We become more aware of the small and simple things which make our hearts happy and open up our minds to experience the beauty and abundance in the world around us and within us. Joseph B. Wirthlin tells us to "...meditate on the things for which you really are grateful. Look for them. They don't have to be grand or glorious. Sometimes we should express our gratitude for the small and simple things like the scent of the rain, the taste of your favorite food, or the sound of a loved one's voice."1

When we choose to count our blessings, we are essentially choosing happiness. One of my favorite authors, Sarah Ban Breathnach, tells us, "Both abundance and lack(of abundance) exist simultaneously in our lives, as parallel realities. It is always our conscious choice which secret garden we will tend...when we choose not to focus on what is missing from our lives but are grateful for the abundance that's present---love, health, family, friends, work, the joys of nature, and personal pursuits that bring us(happiness)---the wasteland of illusion falls away and we experience heaven on earth."2

I have recently started a new "counting your blessings" ritual, and it has worked wonders for me! I bought a bag of 50 marbles. (You could use any small object that is easy to handle---dry beans, pebbles, buttons, pennies, wrapped candy, etc). The exercise consists of simply emptying the marbles (or other small object of choice) into a bowl, then, one by one, assigning a blessing to each one as you move it from the bowl back to the bag it came in. Very simple! The beauty of this exercise is that it forces you to get specific with the awareness of your blessings. Typically, most of us tend to generalize when counting blessings: "I am grateful for my body. I am grateful for my living quarters. I am grateful for food. I am grateful for my relationships." That is 4  marbles. You would still have 46 to go! You have to dig deeper. What about my living quarters am I grateful for? Running water? A refrigerator? Electricity? Carpet? A warm bed? And what about food? What food am I grateful for? My access to food? My ability to digest and metabolize food? The taste of my favorite food? A stove to cook it on? My vast access to recipes? Etc...

Now you are really counting, right? By the time you finish with all 50 marbles, you can't help but feel abundant and appreciative, and you will soon begin to see that counting youur blessings is a catalyst to happiness. After all, as Charles Spurgeon tells us, "It's not how much we have, but how much we enjoy, that makes happiness."

Now, have a wonderful day and go count some marbles!

1. Joseph B. Wirthlin, "Improving Our Prayers", Liahona August 2004.

2. Sarah Ban Brathnach, in John Cook, comp., "The Book of Positive Quotations, 2nd ed.(2004), 342.