“If you really think about it,” wrote Mark Batterson, “it’s the bad days that help us appreciate the good days. Without them, we’d have no comparison point.”

In Mark Batterson’s book, If, he urges us to count our blessings and to remind everyone else how blessed we all are! He suggests that we consider these things:

If you woke this morning with more health than illness — you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation — you are better off than five hundred million people in the world.

If you can attend a church meeting, or not attend one, without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death — you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep — you are richer than 75 percent of the world’s wealthy.

If you can read a book, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

In her book, Choosing Gratitude, Nancy DeMoss described a scene taking place in India: A 3-year-old boy is leaning against the cot of his dying mother. The boy’s eyes are hollow, his stomach is distended, and his face is fly-infested. An American pastor observing the child and his mother made this statement: “Standing there in that slum, I felt all complaints I had ever spoken as if they were a weight on my shoulders.”

After returning to America, the pastor asked a church leader from India who had come to the states to study, “What do you think of Americans?” The man from India answered, “You have no idea how much you have, and yet you always complain.”

In our journaling class at church, we include in our journals a prayer list, a section in which we write letters to God, and pages for recording scriptures. Sometimes our “God letters” become a little whiney and self-centered as we describe our problems. Lest discouragement creep in, we turn to our Thanksgiving page, where we have listed daily blessings as well as great big miracles which God has performed in our behalf. When we reread each blessing and give thanks once more, our faith becomes brighter and our problems grow dimmer.

When Jesus told the disciples to provide food for five thousand hungry people, the situation looked hopeless; all they found was a little boy’s small lunch. Jesus took it, looked to heaven and gave thanks. His thanksgiving brought a miracle blessing that day—all the people were fed, and there was food left over.

When we take inventory of what we already have and give thanks for it, we realize that we are very rich indeed.

“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” –Melody Beattie

As Americans, we are very rich indeed! Let us give thanks for what we have and cry out to our Creator for His mercy and grace to reign over our nation.