Counting Your Blessings

“What does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God” Micah 6:8

All of us have been, at some point in our lives, through a passage of suffering and struggling to cope. I think you might agree that those times in our lives can be the times when it is hardest to feel we are walking humbly with God, and definitely hard to feel “blessed”.
No-one wants to be told that personal anguish is something to be grateful for, or to be considered a kind of blessing. At the darkest times of our lives, the last thing we want to feel is that we are having to suffer for some kind of reward.
Being able to hold on to the practise of gratitude for the smallest of blessings has personally saved me from dark times in my own life. I keep a gratitude journal, jotting down things that have happened to me during my day that I can pause and offer thanks for. Some days the list of gratitude flows from my pen with easy abundance. Some days I struggle to find things to offer gratitude for, and on those days I have learnt that I need to hold my struggle up to God in prayer, and just rest in His presence.
When I look back on darker times with a clearer perspective, I can acknowledge that there were lessons learnt, new journeys started, unexpected paths taken, and that I am a different, more mature person on my continuing journey.
In asking us to walk humbly with our God, we are a reminded that we are all on a journey, and that the path will have patches of rough as well as smooth. God will always be there with us, if we ask Him to be.
Through the words of the prophets and the Gospels, and God Himself, we have the assurance that God is with us, walking by our side on every journey, each step of the way.