The Arithmetic of Counting Blessings

"Count it all joy."

I've heard this throughout my Missionary Baptist upbringing sitting on rough royal blue upholstered pews in the days where I still had the audacity to wear white stockings. I shudder to think. But at that point in my life, I grouped that phrase with other stock sayings I'd hear older black folk say, like "Lord willin' and the creek don't rise" and "Don't step on my grass", and I left it at that.

I got a little older, and my cynicism started to come of age as well. I was beginning to think of "Count it all joy" as nothing but a mantra for the downtrodden, something sighed out from bowed and shaking heads, a sentence akin to "Keep on keepin' on", "Gotta go through to get through", and maybe even "Grin and bear it". I thought it added some temporary, far-fetched hope that there was joy to be found in everything. I was overhearing it in conversations about loss, about grief, about heartache, sorrow, about minor and major hardships, and I was having a difficult time rationalizing what good, what joy, could be counted of the messes they were enduring.

I'm beginning now, just really really now to see that there is a beautiful defiance in counting it all joy, that I had preemptively esteemed as an unrealistic way of being. It says to the ills that we encounter that yes, while I may have shed tears, suffered a battered ego, a bludgeoned spirit, or a broken heart, I can still extract some strength and wisdom from it all, and ultimately that it did not serve to debilitate me. I'm still here, enjoying sunshine and Miles Davis and peanut butter and jelly and the knowledge that my pains are not permanent, and that there is no wrong in allowing myself the experience of being open enough to risk encountering them.

All these hurts we endure and scars we accrue are testaments to the fact that we are human. Breathing, growing, learning, adapting beings.

And there ain't an ounce of shame in that.

So a bird pooped on me during an outdoor rehearsal for Merchant of Venice the other day. I must admit I'm having some difficulty finding the joy in that...