ELDER: Too Many Blessings to Count

As I took a walk through our neighborhood, I approached one stretch of the roadway thickly overrun with leaves from a nearby tree. If I hadn’t veered off from my route near the edge of the curb, I would have had to wade through an ankle-deep pool of those familiar multicolored symbols of the autumn season. We usually don’t think about how many leaves adorn the trees around us until they are released to cover our lawns. Raking them up has to be one of my least favorite yard jobs. However, what if we were tasked with not only removing those leaves from our landscape but counting them as we did so? That would be a long, arduous, and maybe even impossible job. There are just too many of them to count.

We are also in the season in which we are often encouraged to count our blessings. It is one thing to pause to lift up a general prayer to our Father thanking Him for all the wonderful and gracious things He has done for us, lumping all of our blessings in one big pile that we dump out before Him with gratitude. However, there can be some value in pinpointing those blessings one by one. I can’t see any good purpose served by counting the leaves as I rake them up, but we could benefit from enumerating our blessings and focusing on them individually. Going through that process might help us better recognize just how gracious God has been to us and how much we truly have to be thankful for.