From my Perspective: Counting Your Blessings

Welcome to December! While I always view November as a month devoted to gratitude and Thanksgiving, December is the month I remember all of the blessings in my life as I prepare again for a new coming year.

A lot of people think gratitude and blessings are one in the same. It can feel this way, and that's not a bad thing – it's good to have both in our lives, but by definition this is how they differ: according to the Meriam Webster dictionary, gratitude is the quality or feeling of being grateful or thankful, while a blessing is defined as a thing conducive to happiness or welfare or something good that you feel very grateful or lucky to have. In very basic terms, one is the thing and the other is how you feel about the thing. The thing that happens is the blessing, and the gratitude is what we feel for the blessing.

And in my mind, this is how they are different for me: a blessing is something I can be grateful for, but not everything I'm grateful for is necessarily a blessing – or maybe it is. That's definitely something to ponder. I'm grateful for my blessings, but I recognize them differently, and while some may be common and ordinary, when I recognize a blessing, I almost always equate it with being a miracle.

If you stop and think about it, almost everything in this life is a miracle. You can be grateful for a new day and you can recognize the blessing of a new day. It might be meeting or seeing the right people at the right time. Think about this. Have you ever noticed when you think of someone, suddenly they show back up in your life, or you've met someone by chance - or what seemed by chance - only to find what they said or their new friendship was exactly what you needed at that very moment in time? Miracle, blessing or both?

Something I decided to do this year, for the month of December, is to count my blessings. Each day, as I'm already writing in my gratitude journal, I'm also doing a section called "Counting my Blessings," where I list at least three blessings I noticed or witnessed that day. What do I consider blessings? Some of the same things I'm grateful for, but often they are just the things I notice that impact me in some way throughout my day or life. Or they might cause me to step back and say "wow," or "how cool was that?"

Some examples of blessings I've noticed just today (and it's very early in the morning as I write this) are the big, beautiful moon shining light everywhere and making the snow sparkle like diamonds while I took the dogs out for their morning walk-about. The warm glow of the fire in the woodstove and the heat it provides (because after a walk-about in freezing temps, heat is a blessing). My two children are always a blessing. Actually, my kids are also truly a miracle. I was told I couldn't have kids, not once, but twice.

What I also found, when I did the proverbial Google search for blessings, was mostly related to religious items and ceremonies. The blessings I'm talking about, while they may be from God if that's what you believe, can be gifts from anyone, anywhere. What or who do you consider blessings in your life? As I mentioned, my kids are a huge blessing. So is my other half and our pets – even the horse who ran me over a couple of months ago, which I'll touch on more next week.

Last month, I offered you the idea of writing in a gratitude journal. This month, I offer you the idea of counting your blessings and writing them along in your gratitude journal as well. I also invite you to find a way to be the blessing for someone or something else. Think about how you can be the blessing in someone's day. A blessing to someone else could be something as simple as a smile, or as much as buying them a meal if needed. That's how we create more blessings in the world, you know, to actually be one of those blessings first.

So this week, while I'm continuing to focus on my blessings, and therefore more things to be grateful for, I ask you to so the same right along with me. Let's be the blessings, and be another reason people count them.