My wife, Paulette, recently had a hospital stay; she eventually had to have surgery, and during her recovery I read to her from Maeve Binchey’s wonderful collection of short stories Chesnut Street (a fictional street in Dublin, Ireland). One of the stories, “The Cure for Sleeplessness,” blessed us both and I would like to share it with you.
 A young mother, who loves her husband and two children very much, and who is loved in return, nevertheless becomes saddened about the way her life has become almost solely focused on caring for her children, doing housework for her family, and supporting her husband, even as she realizes that they are grateful. She becomes tired and is depressed to the point where she has trouble sleeping at night, which makes the situation even worse. She finally confides her problems to a friend in the United States who, in return, promises to send her grandmother’s cure for sleeplessness.

 When the cure comes, it is a set of instructions. She is to buy a nice notebook and paste a picture of a flower on the first page. When she finds that she can’t sleep, she is to stop tossing and turning, and get up out of bed. She is then to consider the blessings in her life, choose one, and spend one hour thinking about it; she is then to write exactly one page about it in her note book. After this, she is to spend another hour doing some special task. Only then is she to go back to bed. She is to do this for twenty nights. At the end of the twenty nights she found she was sleeping well. She also found that she had so many blessings that she had trouble choosing one. It was a cure!

 The story has much the same message as the beloved hymn “Count Your Blessings” by Johnson Oatman. At one level, it is telling us to be thankful for the blessings we have. At another level, it tells us we need to take an inventory of the blessings in our life. As in the story, we get so tied up in the trials of daily life that we are no longer aware of the positives. This puts a twist on Socrates’ saying that the “unexamined life is not worth living” by saying that until we intentionally look for our blessings, we often fail to see them.

 As I thought more about the story, I realized something else; there is a subtle difference between a blessing and something to be thankful for. For example, I was very thankful for the skills of the surgeon and the nurses that cared for Paulette, but I was blessed by the kindness and concern they showed. Of course, the real blessing was a healthier Paulette in my life. As another example, we are grateful for the wonderful weather we have here in Ocala, but sometimes we are truly blessed by a beautiful sunset as God closes his eyes for the night. Blessings are what God gives us regardless of how much or how little we have to be thankful for.

 Read Ezekiel 34:25-31, and remember: God loves YOU unconditionally.

Jim

Today’s Reading: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ezekiel%2034:25-31