How to Encourage Thankfulness by Counting Your Blessings Daily
Every November, thankfulness abounds. Thanksgiving draws near; people start to think about all the blessings in their lives. Posts about gratitude appear across social media channels. Multitudes of people share things they’re thankful for.
Then the calendar changes. As fall turns into winter, displays of thankfulness fade away, until next year.
My family fell into this trap as well. Each year we’d spend a good chunk of November prepping the kids for our church’s “Pie and Praise Fellowship” the night before Thanksgiving. We wanted to ensure they each had a blessing to share when it was their turn to talk.
But after Thanksgiving, we just stopped. When it wasn’t November, we didn’t talk about being thankful.
However, a couple of years ago, we took a closer look at the words of 1 Thessalonians 5:18:
“In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” (KJV)
There is no seasonal boundary on that verse. There’s no mention of November at all. You see, God wants us to be thankful all the time, for everything.
Count Your Blessings
My husband and I desired to be grateful. We wanted our kids to easily pick out blessings in their lives and recognize who they came from. So, we decided to try something new.
Each morning and evening, we join as a family and sing the chorus of the hymn “Count Your Blessings” by Johnson Oatman, Jr.
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
Count your blessings, see what God hath done!
Count your blessings, name them one by one,
And it will surprise you what the Lord hath done.
After singing, we go around the room and everyone shares something they’re thankful for.
Eventually, we realized the kids were always thankful for the same thing. Morning after morning, night after night, they’d say the same thing. They might word it slightly different, but the blessing was the same.
Being thankful was becoming routine. We didn’t want that; so we put our heads together to brainstorm ways to change it up a bit.
Blessings Challenge
To encourage everyone to truly think about the many blessings in our lives, we started sharing a challenge.
Each morning, the kids could share any blessing they’d like. Then, we’d offer a challenge, a category of thankfulness we wanted everyone to think about.
When we joined back together at night, after singing, we reviewed the challenge quickly. Then we each took a turn sharing our blessing from the challenge category.
Here are some recent examples:
• A special gift you’ve received
• Someone from church
• Something God made during the days of creation
• A person who isn’t related to us
• An author who wrote a book you love
• Someone in the extended family
• A special gift or talent God has given you
• Something that made you smile today
• Something one of your siblings did for you today
• A favorite food you got to enjoy recently
Filled with Blessings
I’d encourage you to make counting your blessings a regular part of your routine. Taking time each day to be purposefully thankful has been tremendous. We are much more aware of all the blessings God pours out on us.
Even on hard days, we can each find something to be thankful for. And when you’re thinking about your blessings, it’s a lot harder to focus on the bad.
Lisa Tanner is a homeschooling mom of eight. She loves writing about balancing diapers and deadlines, and ways to make learning fun.
