Count Your Blessings

• You have a hundred million receptors in your eyes to enjoy the magic of a leaf, a snowflake, pond, child, cloud, star, rose.
• Twenty four thousand fibers in each ear vibrate at the laugh of a baby, sound of the wind, the waves upon a rock, the call of a robin, children at play.
• You are able to formulate words to communicate your needs, connect to other people, bring comfort to the unhappy, encourage the defeated.
• Your heart maintains your life. Touch your chest and feel its rhythm, pulsating, hour after hour, day and night, thirty-six million beats each year, year after year, asleep or awake, pumping your blood through more than sixty thousand miles of veins and arteries. Pumping more than six hundred thousand gallons each year. Man has never created such a machine.
• Your lungs bring in life-giving oxygen and filter air through six hundred million pockets of folded flesh while they rid your body of gases. You have five quarts of blood which contain twenty-two trillion blood cells and within each cell are millions of molecules and within each molecule is an atom oscillating at more than ten million times each second. Each second, two million of your blood cells die to be replaced by two million more in a resurrection that has continued since your birth.
• Your brain is the most complex structure in the universe. Within its three pounds are thirteen billion nerve cells, more than double the number of people on earth. And one thousand billion, billion protean molecules to help you file away every perception, sound, taste, smell, every action you have experienced since before the day of your birth. Every incident in your life is there awaiting your recall. And to help your brain control your body, you have four million pain-sensitive structures, five hundred thousand touch detectors, and more than two hundred thousand temperature detectors.
• You are not a bush condemned to a small plot while the wind and world abuses you. You can stretch and run and dance and work, for within you are five hundred muscles, two hundred bones and seven miles of nerve fibers all synchronized to do your bidding.

You are rich. You don’t need to count the money in your bank account or look to your material possessions you need to count your blessings. You possess physical and spiritual assets of far greater value. Count your blessings and know that you are God’s greatest creation. Your blessings overflow your cup.

(Adapted from Og Mandino, The Greatest Miracle in the World)

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