Count your blessings

Is it just me getting old or is the world really spinning faster than it did when I was a child? Everything seemed so simple then, but now everyone seems to be in such a hurry to get somewhere. Where? Do you often feel there are just not enough hours in the day? Sometimes the urge to scream: “Stop the world I want to get off!” is overwhelming. Yet as the English poet William Henry Davies (1871-1940) once wrote: ‘What is this world if full of care we have no time to stand and stare?’

Please, for your own peace of mind, take up Davies’s hint. Turn off the computer, the mobile phone or whatever gizmo is absorbing your attention at this moment. Take the time to look out of the window; to see the butterflies enthusiastically sipping the nectar from the buddleia bush, or the blackbird tugging a worm from the rain soaked garden. Perhaps you don’t have a garden, then look out of the window of the train taking you to the concrete jungle in which you work. See the birds wheeling overhead on the updraft, or just take in the sunshine (or the rain!). And as you trudge the pavement to the office see the daisy pushing valiantly through the concrete to display her white flower surrounding a golden centre in the midst of the rubbish. Maybe you are confined to your room; yet the sun still shines to brighten the day and the stars come out each night. And there is that vase of flowers on the table left by a friend. Davies concludes his poem by saying that: A poor life this if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.

I think he is right, since I believe that our world is good. OK, sometimes God seems to be hidden but have we stopped looking for goodness? I hope not, for all of these, and many more are blessings of God, a God who loves us unconditionally. When we see that the world is good, and that God is blessing us, we can then recognise the unique glory that is Jesus Christ. 
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Remember, you cannot count your blessings until you begin to recognise them.