“Count your blessings, not your problems. Count your own blessings, not someone else’s. Remember that jealousy is when you count someone else’s blessings instead of your own.” ― Roy T. Bennett in The Light in the Heart
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Reading is one of my favorite pastimes. I have a collection of books and magazines. Recently, while reading some back issues of Reader’s Digest, one of the features that caught my attention was the story of Major Frederick Franks.
Here’s how Suzanne Chazin wrote the story:
Major Frederick Franks stared at the Christmas tree in his drab hospital room. It was the time of year for joy, but Franks felt only sadness. Seven months earlier, in May 1970, while he was in Cambodia, grenade shrapnel had torn into the lower half of his left leg. Doctors were preparing to amputate it.
Franks had graduated from the US military academy at West Point, where he was captain of the baseball team, and he had planned to make the army his career. Now, retirement seemed the only option. Although Franks felt he still had a lot to offer the army – combat experience, technical knowledge, an ability to solve problems – he knew that soldiers with severe injuries seldom return to active duty. They must pass a yearly physical-fitness test, which includes a three-kilometer run or walk. Franks wasn’t sure he would be up to the task with prosthesis.
After the surgery, Franks felt saddest of all about giving up his prowess on the baseball diamond. At weekly games, he batted while someone else ran the bases for him.
Waiting to bat one day, he watched a teammate slide into base. ‘What’s the worst that could happen if I tried the same thing?’ he thought.
In his next turn with the bat, Franks hit the ball into center field. Waving away his runner, he began a painful, stiff-legged jog. Between first and second, he saw the outfielder throw the ball towards the second baseman. Closing his eyes, he willed himself forward and slid into second. The umpire called “Safe!” and Franks smiled triumphantly.
A few years later, Franks led a squadron through military exercises in rough terrain. His superiors wondered if an amputee was up to the challenge, but Franks showed them he was. “Losing a leg has taught me that a limitation is as big or small as you make it,” he said. “The key is to concentrate on what you have, not what you don’t have.”
In simpler terms, count your blessings each day. Sweat that small stuff, so goes a popular saying. “The things that count most cannot be counted,” a friend once told me. William A. Ward agrees: “The more we count the blessings we have, the less we crave the luxuries we haven’t.”
I once visited a beautiful home just at sundown. I looked out of the large window and remarked what a magnificent view they had with the setting sun. “Oh.” said our host, “why, that happens so often we don’t even see it anymore.” I wonder how many of us are like my friend with his view of the sunset. We have so many blessings that we never take time to look at them or count them.
On a gloomy, rainy morning, it was the turn of an eight-year-old boy to say the blessing at breakfast. “We thank Thee for this beautiful day,” he prayed. His mother, a little bit surprised, asked him why he said that when the day was anything but beautiful. “Mother,” said he, with rare wisdom, “never judge a day by its weather.”
“People have been wonderful to me in the good times and the bad, and I’ve come to believe that you do indeed reap what you sow,” said Bob Losure. “For those who constantly gripe about life, I turn and walk away. For those who speak negatively about people behind their backs, I move on.”
“Look at the sunny side of everything,” Christian D. Larsen urges. “Think only of the best, work only for the best, and expect only the best. Be as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own. Forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future. Give everyone a smile. Spend so much time improving yourself that you have no time left to criticize others. Be too big for worry and too noble for anger.”
In some instances, it may not be enough to count your blessings. You have to share your blessings to others, too. “Make something beautiful of your life,” Kathie Lee Gifford wrote in her 1992 book, I Can’t Believe I Said That. “Be a blessing, not a burden. Bloom wherever you are planted.”
In The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas wrote: “Those born to wealth, and who have the means of gratifying every wish, know not what is the real happiness of life, just as those who have been tossed on the stormy waters of the ocean on a few frail planks can alone realize the blessings of fair weather.”
Steve Maraboli, author of Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human, penned: “The problem that we have with a victim mentality is that we forget to see the blessings of the day. Because of this, our spirit is poisoned instead of nourished.”
Share your blessings to others, too. “So many people think that they are not gifted because they don’t have an obvious talent that people can recognize because it doesn’t fall under the creative arts category – writing, dancing, music, acting, art or singing,” wrote Shannon L. Alder.
“Sadly, they let their real talents go undeveloped, while they chase after fame,” she continued. “I am grateful for the people with obscure unremarked talents because they make our lives easier – inventors, organizers, planners, peacemakers, communicators, activists, scientists, and so forth. However, there is one gift that trumps all other talents – being an excellent parent. If you can successfully raise a child in this day in age to have integrity, then you have left a legacy that future generations will benefit from.”
Charles Dickens reminds: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many; not on your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
One Chinese proverb warns, “Blessings never come in pairs; misfortunes never come alone.”
