Count Your Blessings…in a Minor Key

The calendar beckons to the dinner table. This week is Thanksgiving, ladled with bounty.

And, hopefully, somewhere between dressing and drumstick, we stop to give thanks.

What does it take to give thanks on Thanksgiving, or any other day of the year?

Is it a complete catalog of your goods in life? Is it a smiling family framed and hung in living rooms? Is it a full fridge and a packed garage?

Take a different perspective, the one of a man who lost everything.

As the story unfolds, we meet a man named Job. His wealth is large and his reputation is great. Laughter from grown children fills his life. But Job differs from a modern portrait of success.

His faith both stands out and marks him for danger. He is blameless, without credible accusations against him. He even sacrifices for his children, lest by a slip, they might offend the Almighty.

But behind the scenes, darkness gathers in a council of the heavenlies. In strode the adversary, Satan. His lips drip with disdain. He believes life is nothing but a series of bargains made for self-advantage.

Job is who Job is because God gives him everything. Reduce him to nothing and see what happens.

And Satan does. Within a matter of hours, Job’s world implodes. A messenger rushes in with the news of marauders who have stolen all his livestock, rendering him penniless. Before that messenger can even finish another bursts into the room with worse news. His entire family, his sons and daughters were eating together when the tower fell, crushing them in the rubble.

Fortune and family gone.

Then, Satan showers his body with sores so painful that only sharpened edges of pottery shards provide momentary relief.

Now try to sing “Count Your Blessings.” Its meter will match a funeral dirge and the key changes to the moanful minor key of despair.

His wife, who has experienced the same loss, wants to snub God and end their lives. If he was so loving, why didn’t he act like it? Instead, God became the villain of her life.

But Job’s soul retains its concrete foundation. He chides her:

“You speak as one of the foolish women would speak. Shall we receive good from God, and shall we not receive evil?” In all this, Job did not sin with his lips.” (Job 2:10, ESV)

Job pulls back a curtain on what makes gratitude circumstance-resistance. In rain and sunshine, in pain and joy, and loss and gain, he knew what it took to give thanks.

You cannot be grateful until you see your life and all that it encompasses as a gift, not a right.

Too many people feel entitled. Life has obligations. To make you comfortable. To give you a measure of health, wealth, and happiness. When those get removed, God has not kept his bargain. That is especially true in a country like ours whose wealth eclipses the rest of the world 10 fold.

So before you open your songbook, tune up your voice and sing, “Count your many blessings, one by one,” stop for a moment. If the list had no items, would you remain grateful for God’s presence, His grace, and the day you live today?

Until you see life and all that is in it as a gift, you will never sing the song well.

Happy Thanksgiving.