Counting Each And Every Blessing

As a parent of a child with additional needs, and especially as a dad, I so often need to be reminded of the importance of counting our blessings each and every day. Each day is rich with blessings, but we can often miss them, or dismiss them, without realising how important they are.

I’ve journaled my blessings before, writing down three or four blessings that I can remember at the end of each day. It might be something as seemingly trivial as James happily going up to bed, or that we’ve had meals to share during the day. It might be something like a meeting about James’ care that went well, or that we saw a friend who helped us. We can see God at work in all of these blessings, it is clear to see them when we look, and once we start looking out for them it becomes easier to spot them.

How about you? Do you look for those blessings? Do you give thanks for them? Do you write them down so that you can remember them? It’s a great practice to get into! Once you start to journal your blessings it becomes not only easier to spot them, but easier to get into the practice of thanking God for them.

If you say “I can’t think of any blessings right now, life is too tough”, I get that, I’ve been in that place too. Sometimes we are so overwhelmed by the tough stuff that it is all that we can think of. But try to get into the habit of spotting the blessings too, even little ones, and you will start to find it easier to identify more. Once I wrote as one of that days blessings that “We have all got safely to the end of the day”, and sometimes that is important to celebrate as a blessing too!

Try thinking about three things to give thanks for today. Write them down. Do it again tomorrow. You will soon get into the habit of identifying those blessings. And on the tough days, when everything seems to have gone wrong, look back through the blessings you’ve written down on the good days and be encouraged by them. As Ann Voskamp write in her book ‘One Thousand Gifts’, if you think of three blessings you have received each day for a year, then you have over a thousand to look back on from that time.

As you can see from the images in this blog post, I’ve still got my journal from 2017 and into 2018, a particularly difficult year for us, and the blessings I wrote down then still encourage me today.

Why not make a start on your own journal today? Maybe one of today’s blessings could be the inspiration to start identifying and writing down your own blessings, journaling them so that you can look back on them in the future, as I do mine, with thanks to God for all that he has done, and still does, to bless us and help us.

Every blessing,

Mark

All text and images except the header image © Mark Arnold / The Additional Needs Blogfather. Header image by Sixteen Miles Out on Unsplash

See also:
Additional Needs Summer Holiday Reading
https://theadditionalneedsblogfather.