What Blessings Might You Be Overlooking?

Today is Election Day in America.

By tomorrow (we hope), we’ll know who will be leading our country for the next four years.

Not everyone will be happy with the result.

Take heart, look around. Count your blessings. They are abundant.

The freedom to vote is one blessing.

The belief we will find a way to move forward together is another.

In her column this past weekend, former Reagan speechwriter and current Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan reminded that, “this country has gotten through a lot.”

It can take a lot of tension. It was born in it and is used to it. We made it through Shay’s Rebellion and Vietnam, the McCarty era and the 1960s. We made it through the Civil War, and we will make it through this. We are practiced at withstanding trials. We have a way of forging through. We should take inspiration from this.

A Time of Gratitude

November is the month first designated in 1789 by President George Washington to take stock of our blessings.

In our country’s early years when agriculture was at the center of our lives, slowing down and being grateful for the harvest made sense.

Slowing down to reflect on our relationships, our accomplishments and our opportunities continues to make sense. 

President Abraham Lincoln proclaimed a national day of “Thanksgiving and Praise” in 1863 when the country was in the middle of the deadliest war ever fought between fellow Americans on our own soil.

Nearly one hundred years later, the Wall Street Journal published an editorial encouraging its readers to “give thanks for America.” Predictably, a reader wrote recently skewering the newspaper (whose editor, by the way, is female) because the article doesn’t mention women. To which a female reader replied, “The 1961 editorial has stood the test of time. It is as meaningful today, though it doesn’t mention women, as it was then, for sincere and virtuous ideas are never outdated.”

Here’s an excerpt:

We can remind ourselves that for all our social discord we yet remain the longest enduring society of free men governing themselves without benefit of kings or dictators. Being so, we are the marvel and the mystery of the world, for that enduring liberty is no less a blessing than the abundance of the earth.

And we might remind ourselves also, that if those men setting out from Delftshaven had been daunted by the troubles they saw around them, then we could not this autumn be thankful for a fair land.

Look around. Blessings are everywhere.

For whom and for what are you grateful?