Count Your Blessings

Where you focus your thoughts greatly effects how you feel, how you talk to others, and your relationship with God. So where should we focus, our blessings or hardships?

A few weeks back my son came home on leave. It was a wonderful time but it was eye opening as well. My son ended up in the exact same job as I currently do. He’s a Program Manager for new technology on government contracts.

We spent way too much of our time lamenting the woes of the job; government red tape, people wanting everything with no budget, projects behind schedule, and so on. We just kept complaining about how bad it was, with a lot of “I’ve got it worse” talks. Then I heard him taking a work call and expressing all the same frustrations and volume as I do when directing the next few steps.

I have to say that was one of several “Cats In the Cradle” moments during that week. I’m referring to the old Cat Stevens song about the boy who grew up to be just like his dad. That’s when my wife reminded us, we were lamenting things we couldn’t change rather than enjoying the blessing of being together. She said we should be counting our blessings over beleaguers. She was right. Attitude puts color on our lives, dashing or drab.

Scriptures tell us in Psalms 55:22:

Cast your burden on the Lord, And He shall sustain you; He shall never permit the righteous to be moved

And in Ephesians 5 19:20 it says:

…. be filled with the Spirit, 19 speaking to one another with psalms, hymns, and songs from the Spirit. Sing and make music from your heart to the Lord, 20 always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

God wants us to count blessings and for many good reasons. Focusing on the good really does change your attitude. It can make the difference in getting through a difficult time. Because no matter what, there are still things to be thankful for.

Did you ever see the movie Young Frankenstein? It’s a comedy spoof on all the Frankenstein horror movies of the 30’s &40’s. In it, Gene Wilder (Dr. Frankenstein) and Marty Feldman (Igor) are digging in a graveyard to build the monster. Gene Wilder says “what a filthy job”. Marty Feldman replies “could be worse… could be raining”.

That is the perfect example of the eternal optimist finding something good during something horrible. Whenever my wife and I are in a bad situation, changing a tire on the side of the road, or at the ER waiting to be seen, one of us will lean to the other and whisper “could be worse… could be raining”. It really works. The levity reminds us to find something we can count as a blessing.

This is another example of Biblical teachings being backed up by science. There was an extensive study done on how focusing on the positive improves our lives. There was an excerpt that I’d like to share from a study where one group was asked to keep a journal on things they were grateful for compared to a control group that kept no journal or one on the bad things.

The excerpt reads:

• In an experimental comparison, those who kept gratitude journals on a weekly basis exercised more regularly, reported fewer physical symptoms, felt better about their lives as a whole, and were more optimistic about the upcoming week compared to those who recorded hassles or neutral life events (Emmons & McCullough, 2003).

• A related benefit was observed in the realm of personal goal attainment: Participants who kept gratitude lists were more likely to have made progress toward important personal goals (academic, interpersonal and health-based) over a two-month period compared to subjects in the other experimental conditions.

• A daily gratitude intervention (self-guided exercises) with young adults resulted in higher reported levels of the positive states of alertness, enthusiasm, determination, attentiveness and energy compared to a focus on hassles or a downward social comparison (ways in which participants thought they were better off than others). There was no difference in levels of unpleasant emotions reported in the three groups.

• Participants in the daily gratitude condition were more likely to report having helped someone with a personal problem or having offered emotional support to another, relative to the hassles or social comparison condition.

• In a sample of adults with neuromuscular disease, a 21-day gratitude intervention resulted in greater amounts of high energy positive moods, a greater sense of feeling connected to others, more optimistic ratings of one’s life, and better sleep duration and sleep quality, relative to a control group.

• Children who practice grateful thinking have more positive attitudes toward school and their families (Froh, Sefick, & Emmons, 2008).(1)