What Have I Been Counting?

Scripture Focus: “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits.” — Psalm 103:2

How often do you find yourself counting burdens instead of blessings? I shudder to think what my answer would be. Maybe you do too. No matter how blessed we may be, it is remarkably easy to become so preoccupied with what is wrong, missing, delayed, broken, expensive, inconvenient, or simply not going according to plan that the good things quietly disappear into the scenery. Give me one disappointment and ten blessings, and there are days when I can spend an astonishing amount of time examining that disappointment from seventeen different angles while the blessings sit patiently in the corner waiting to be noticed.

Perhaps that is why David said, “Bless the LORD, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2). I find it interesting that David had to remind his own soul not to forget. Apparently, this tendency of ours is nothing new. We can become so occupied with the thing that hurts that His goodness becomes harder to see. The blessings have not disappeared; our attention has simply wandered elsewhere.

Paul tells us to “Rejoice evermore” (1 Thessalonians 5:16), and I will admit that sounds considerably easier when life is behaving itself. Rejoicing does not come quite so naturally when we are frustrated, disappointed, heartbroken, tired, or feeling as though life has force-fed us a bowl of lemons and then cheerfully asked whether we would like seconds. Yet I do not believe God is asking us to pretend lemons taste like peaches. Jesus Himself wept. David grieved. Job mourned. There are things in this life that genuinely hurt, and gratitude does not require us to deny them.

What gratitude does is keep the painful thing from becoming the only thing. It reminds us that even in difficult seasons, sorrow is not the whole story. Sometimes the blessing is not that God removed the difficulty, but that when we look back, we realize He somehow kept putting enough strength beneath us for one more day.

I wonder how many blessings we have stopped noticing simply because they have become familiar. There are mercies we once prayed desperately for that have now become part of ordinary life. An answered prayer eventually becomes something we simply expect to be there. A provision that once brought tears of gratitude becomes another item in the household. Even people can become so familiar that we forget what a gift it is simply to hear their voice. Familiarity has a sneaky way of turning miracles into furniture.

Then there are the mercies we may never know about this side of eternity—the accident that did not happen, the door God kept closed, the delay that protected us, the temptation from which He quietly redirected us, the thousand unseen ways His providence surrounded an ordinary Tuesday. I suspect heaven may hold quite a few moments when we finally understand something that disappointed us here and say, “Lord, I had no idea.”

And when we begin counting carefully, sooner or later every list leads us back to Jesus. Whatever today has brought, we have not been forgotten. Christ has given us forgiveness we could never earn, grace we could never deserve, His presence for this journey, and the assurance that this broken world does not get the final word. He has promised, “I will come again” (John 14:3). There is a home ahead where there will be no disappointments left to count.

Reflection Questions:

1. What disappointment has occupied so much of my attention lately that other evidences of God’s goodness have faded into the background?
2. What do I have in my life today that I once specifically prayed for?
3. Which difficult experience from my past now contains evidence of God’s faithfulness that I could not recognize while I was living through it?
4. If I began counting only today’s blessings—especially the ordinary ones—what would make the list that I normally overlook?

Prayer Prompt:
Lord Jesus, forgive me for the times I have counted my disappointments so carefully while allowing Your mercies to pass unnoticed. Help me to “forget not all his benefits” (Psalm 103:2), especially the familiar blessings I no longer recognize as gifts. When life hurts, help me to be honest about the sorrow without losing sight of Your goodness, and teach me to remember how faithfully You have carried me before. Above every other blessing, keep my heart grateful for You, my Savior, my hope, and the One who has promised to bring me safely home. Amen.

If this devotional stirred your heart to follow Christ more closely and to walk with purpose, take the next step in His Word—“Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee” (Psalms 119:11). Keep your eyes on Jesus and let Scripture dwell richly in you day by day.

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