"All that we behold is full of blessings."

I would love to say that I have somehow managed to perfect the imperfectable art of being content in any and every circumstance and that I have this second-nature quality which allows me to never miss an opportunity to take into consideration how deeply and widely and overly blessed I am each and every day of my life. But that would be a lie. A nice one, a wonderfully-fabricated lie, but a lie nonetheless. You see, truth be told, I am blessed beyond reason, beyond anything I myself could ever hope for or contrive or even deserve, and yet, this very fact still slips my mind about 99% of the time.

I will forever ask myself the unavoidable, cliche question: "Why is it so easy for me to take note of all the things I don't have and merely disregard and overlook all the blessings I do have?" It seems as though I only take inventory of all of life's blessings when one appears to be missing, thus sending me into a tizzy of ungratefulness and self-absorbed self-absorbedness. Basically, I am a blessing hog, a miser of blessings, but I rarely take the time to even acknowledge this overabundant array of blessedness I've somehow managed to rake in. Oh how quickly we lose sight of how blessed we are to be blessed.

And I AM blessed. I am crazily blessed. You know when it's cold out, but there's still a considerable amount of sunshine, and then a piece of the sweet warmth sneaks in through one of the frosted window panes and radiates throughout that one area, encompassing all inside it with a strange but quite welcomed glow? Yes, well that is the best analogy I can conceive to describe how blessed my life is. My life's blessings are nothing but the sunshine-y spot that sneaks through the window on a bitter winter's day. Yet, so often I am prone to remain outside the gloriously heated zone (for lack of a better, more accurate term). I walk through it for a moment perhaps and acknowledge the blessings' presence in that instance and that instance alone, and then proceed to plod on forward, letting this beautiful, unceasing gratitude-worthy discovery be forgotten, or at best, placed on the back burner.

Such is life. As I have said approximately a million times already in this post, I am blessed. I know this to be true for a fact. But I am so utterly, embarrassingly terrible at letting this knowledge affect me, affect how I perceive my life, affect how I perceive the needs of others, affect how I perceive my Savior. Because I have yet to master the craft of makings blessings contagious, though I hope and pray with all my might that I will one day have it down cold. Ideally, blessings should prompt more than thankfulness. They should prompt an eager change, a refusal to allow anyone around you to go a day without being enveloped with the gift of these same blessings, a determination to make the alive and active presence and love and grace of Jesus Christ known not only through a grateful and selfless proclamation of blessings, but also through the perpetual fervor required to share these blessings, and in turn, to share Christ.

And that's it. It's one thing to know you're blessed. It's another thing to be appreciative of these blessings. And it's a far better thing to let this appreciation compel you to share these blessings. Indeed. To make these blessings contagious.