The phrase sounds kind of “old-fashioned” and reminds me of an old gospel tune that has the line “count your blessings, name them one by one.” I’m in a spiritual formation group right now that is reading James Bryan Smith’s The Good and Beautiful God. At the end of each chapter, there are “soul-training” exercises and “counting your blessings” is the current one. One thing we are trying to do this week as a group is to think of five things for which we are thankful each day. Here are mine for today:

1.  Receiving two calls that from people I’d been meaning to call–saved me the effort of trying to track them down!

2.  Cool nights that make for good sleeping weather.

3.  The chance to sing with my friends in Capriccio Columbus this evening.

4.  Meet-ups at Chubby’s with my son.

5.  Every day I get to spend with my wife!

We talked about gratitude yesterday and how this isn’t often our default and how thankfulness (for me it is to God for these blessings) enriches our lives. Thinking of the title of the book, it strikes me that thankfulness reminds me of how good and beautiful life often is (as well as being hard and painful at times). We often talk about the “problem of evil or suffering” but much less about what I might call the “problem of goodness”–why is there so much goodness and beauty in the world? Counting blessings leads me to think (and I know not all will agree) that it is because there is indeed a good a beautiful God who is the source of these things.