Count Your Blessings.

When upon life’s billows you are tempest-tossed,

When you are discouraged, thinking all is lost,

Count your many blessings; name them one by one,

And it will surprise you what the Lord has done.

So amid the conflict, whether great or small,

Do not be discouraged; God is over all.

Count your many blessings; angels will attend,

Help and comfort give you to your journey’s end.

Text: Johnson Oatman Jr., 1856–1922

I have discovered a program called Hoopla which means I can download books from the library to my iphone. I can have 5 a month and means I can listen to books when the pain is bad and I have to lay in bed. Often times my energy is so low I cannot hold a book. A great blessing this is.

I recently came across a book called A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry. It describes the poverty and hardship of the people of India. Unless you live in a shack or sleep on a railway station platform night after night with very little food and have to squat on a railway line to empty your bowels being the only place to go... then you have more blessings than you can guess.

From amazon:

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future.