What is “The Blessing Book?”

When I was nine, I was given my first “Blessing Book.”

It was a hardback journal with unlined pages.

Inside the front cover my mother wrote, “Take the time at the end of each day to write down how God has blessed you.”

This and a similar book were given to me and my sister as an alternative to “diaries,” which (we were warned) can quickly devolve into repositories of parental hatred (”Dad isn’t fair!”), sibling insults (”She’s dumb and she won’t let me play with her Jem doll!”), and secret talk about boys (”It would be SO GROSS to kiss him!”).

Such a thing would almost certainly mark the beginning of a quick and devastating moral decline, wherein my years of faithful sunday school attendance, conscientious commandment-keeping, and gold-star-level memory verse work would come to naught.  Thus, this journal – my blessing book - would document only my many nine-year-old blessings.

My nine-year-old worldview.  My nine-year-old theology, politics, phonics, philosophies, spelling errors, crafts, dreams, punctuation, friends, and favorite tv shows.

It was a simpler time.  A rural-Ohio time.  An in-church-indeed-too-often time.  A time for Olympic dreams and pitch-in dinners and oh dear God was it a time for Perfect Strangers.

And Voltron.  And hotdogs.

I made an entry almost every day.  They’ll appear here just as often.

Enjoy the blessings.

[Notes: For the sake of authenticity, effort has been made to retain the exact spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, spacing, and ink color that is found in the original book.]