"The Blessing Inventory: How to count the small things that matter most"

When was the last time you thanked God for clean laundry? Or for the fact that your car started this morning? In this soul-refreshing solo episode, we’re doing a blessing inventory—not of the big, flashy miracles, but of the quiet, daily gifts we often overlook.

Just like inventory at a big-box retailer, your spiritual life needs regular check-ins. What blessings are collecting dust on your soul’s shelves? From warm coffee to unexpected texts, we’re naming the small things that reveal God’s constant care.

Through Scripture, real talk, and faith-filled reflection, we’ll learn how gratitude for the little things unlocks peace, presence, and perspective.

📖 Featuring Bible verses from Lamentations 3, Psalm 103, James 1, and Philippians 4.

🎧 Tune in to shift your focus, reset your heart, and start counting what truly matters.

#BlessingInventory #Gratitude #FaithPodcast #ChristianWomen #UnrelatedSisters #SmallBlessings #TruthAndGrace #ChristianEncouragement #SoloEpisode

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:15

Dear Lord Jesus, I come to you. to thank you for this opportunity to pour into other women, to pour into the listeners, Lord Jesus. I thank you for the blessings and the grace that you show me every day. I pray, Lord Jesus, that the listeners feel that grace and they find that grace in you, Lord Jesus. I pray that they listen and they find your presence, Lord Jesus. I pray that it helps them to heal, Lord, Wherever they stand, Lord Jesus, I want to thank you for this opportunity. I want to thank you, Lord Jesus, for everything that you have ever done for me, for the grace that you show me daily. Lord Jesus, please give me the words that you want me to say. Give me the strength to tell them transparently where we are in life, Lord Jesus. And we just thank you today. We thank you with an open heart and an open mind. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Hey family, welcome back to Unrelated Sisters Truth and Grace Conversation. I'm Shannon, and today I'm by myself, and we are talking about real life, real faith, and real freedom. I am so grateful that you are here with me today. This episode is a personal one, a quiet, kind of powerful one. We're not talking about breakthrough blessings or the miracles you post about on Facebook. Not today. Today we're going to talk about the small blessings, the ones we overlook, the daily deposits of grace we forget to count. Sometimes in life, it feels like life gets in the way, and sometimes Instead of being thankful that our car started today or instead of being thankful that we woke up this morning with just a few aches and pains and not any true medical issues, instead of being thankful that there's food in our cupboards and being thankful that we have money to put gas in our cars, instead of being that way, we want to complain or whine about our knees hurting or our back hurting or our head hurting when we should be thankful for the blessings that we receive. The things that God gives us daily. Have you ever worked in retail? I do. An inventory day is a serious deal. Every product big or small Why? Because value can't be managed if it's not recognized. And getting ready and prepared, getting organized, getting cleaned up, getting to the place to where people, other people, strangers can come in and count your blessings or count your inventory. So today we're doing a blessing inventory. Not just the big stuff, but the overlooked ones. Clean laundry, unexpected laughter, no traffic, someone just texting you saying thank you or that they're thinking of you or that they love you. Let's count the things we stopped noticing but couldn't live without. Why small blessings matter. Let's talk about small blessings. You know what they are. Breath in your lungs. A roof over your head. Warm food. A good hair day. The strength to get out of the bed. The smile from a stranger that shifts your whole mood for the day. We often wait for big blessings, the house, the healing, the husband, the promotion, but sometimes it's the little things that are sustaining us to be in between those big breakthroughs. Limitations 3.22-23 Because of the Lord's great love, we are not consumed, but His compassion never fails. They are new every morning, great in your faithfulness. So the small blessings that we receive every day for me is the small things at work, right? When someone tells me I'm doing a good job or one of my associates tell me they love working for me, coming home and snuggling with my husband, That's a small blessing. Coming home and having able to cook dinner, even though some days I want to complain or I want to whine because I've worked 12 hours today and I don't want to come home and cook dinner. I want to stop and pick something up. But my husband loves a home-cooked meal. He'd much rather have a home-cooked meal than fast food, and you can't blame him, right? It's definitely better to cook it at home. But those small blessings, the ones where I can't afford to stop and pick up food if I don't want to cook, or I can come home and cook, or when he's cleaned off the counter, when he's done a load of towels because I didn't get to them yesterday on my day off. Those are the small blessings that make me thankful, that make me grateful where I am today. I remember praying. a father for Dylan and a husband for myself, for someone to love me the way that I love them. And I remember it not always making the right choices, not always making the right choices. And then I wanted to fix them. I wanted the worst of the worst. I wanted the one that was so scarred that the only person that could bring them back would be Jesus. But I thought I could do it, you know. I just, you know, and I prayed one day and I was dating a guy and he had kids of his own and he was really, really good to his kids. And, you know, he proposed and I said yes. But the closer it got... to actually going through with the process of getting married, the more I started having panic attacks, the more I started feeling overwhelmed and out of control, and the more that I couldn't do it. I couldn't do it. I went to the post office. We had spent quite a bit of money on some really fancy, nice invitations, and I'd sat down, and I'd wrote everybody letters, you know, an invitation and I went and bought stamps and, you know, stamps aren't cheap. And I went to the post office and I just sat there. It's like my legs didn't work. I couldn't get out of my car. And I just sat there and I cried and I cried and I cried. And at that moment, God spoke to me. He told me that I didn't need a husband anymore. for myself to find my worth. I didn't need a husband to feel safe. I didn't need a husband to be with me, that he was there and he had always been there. I didn't need a father for my son because Jesus was there. Jesus walked with him every day. Jesus had his hand on his shoulder every day. And I had to come, I had to surrender that. I had to speak it out into existence, and I had to surrender that to Jesus. And the minute I did, it seemed like my thought process changed. It seemed like my heart felt a little healthier. Maybe a block fell off the wall when that happened. But every single morning, that means today's blessings are fresh, not recycled. God doesn't run out. He continues to give you blessings every day, whether it's the same blessing from day to day, because you didn't recognize that it was a blessing, you know, or it's a new, fresh, but every day it's a fresh. Every day waking up is a blessing. Every day being able to go to work is a blessing. Every day being able to pray to God is a blessing. Inventory isn't just for stores. Okay, retail people, you'll know how this feels. Inventory in a big box store is a whole process. You scan it, you get ready, you get prepared, right? Everything has to have its place, and in its place it has to be. The store has to be clean. It has to be organized, organized. In the grocery areas, it has to have the same item front to back. In the apparel, everything has to have a tag on it. In toys, you have to count those small LOL balls that are in baskets, anything under$5. In a big store, you don't want to miss anything. You have to count the back rooms. You have to dig and make sure everything is being accounted for. You have to get underneath the counters. You have to get underneath the bins in the back room. You have to... Be focused, and it has to be right. You need every dollar accounted for. Your home office tells you this is how much freight you should have in your building, and they want it accounted for. Now, there's some shrink. There's some loss. There's some things that walk away, and in retail, that's bad, but When we're counting our blessings, is that bad? You know, is the shrink bad in our everyday life? You know, I truly believe that God brings into your life whatever you need at that time, whether it's a person, whether it's a song, whether it's a Bible verse that you can't get out of your head, that I truly believe that God gives you that moment. In that moment, what you truly need. I've been in my job for 23 years. I've worked for the same company. And every promotion that I've tried for on my own, I haven't received. I have been passed over, overlooked. But every promotion that he pushes me to take, every promotion that he has wanted me to take, he has put me in a store. Where I could be His light. He has put me in the company. He has moved me around. And every one of them that I've had is because I needed to be a light in that store. That store needed Jesus. It needed to feel His love and His presence. One time I... I thought I was pregnant. We had been trying. And I... I miscarried before it had had time to get latched on real well. I started bleeding, and that devastated me. I have one son. He is not my husband's, even though my husband loves him. Biologically, he's not his. And I wanted so badly to give my husband and my mother-in-law, you know, a child and a grandchild at one time. You know, and again, you know, God comes to me and he says, another child is not going to fix the mistakes from the past. Another child is not going to bring you and your husband or your husband's family closer together, which don't get me wrong. We are very close. I love my mother-in-law. I love my father-in-law. I believe if I couldn't get a hold of my mama and I called my mother-in-law that she would jump into her car and come to my rescue if I was to ever need her. But that's a blessing. A lot of families don't have that. A lot of people I know, they don't get along with their mother-in-law. They don't get along with the other side of the family. And you can't do that. I'm getting off topic here, aren't I? So inventory has to be tedious. You have to be tedious. Why? Because you can't manage what you don't count. You can't manage what you don't count. You can't manage what you don't see. You can't account for it if you don't organize it. Right? So it's the same with your blessings. Some of us are spiritually discouraged because, not because we aren't blessed, but because we're not taking inventory. You know, sometimes we forget things. The small things that we get happy in our world or we get joyful in our world and we forget the blessings that God gives us. And sometimes we forget where we came from or where we're headed. And that's okay. It is. But today we want to try. I want you to try something. I want you to take one full day and write down every blessing that you notice intentionally. look for the blessings, right? Not just the obvious ones, but the fact that your car started, that your child give you a hug, that you had food in your fridge, that your anxiety didn't win today, right? Those are pretty big deals in an everyday life, right? In Psalms 103.2, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. It's not that we're ungrateful. We're just unintentional. Sometimes we forget. Let's start remembering, you know, being unintentional or, you know, being intentional is hard for me. Um, I'm a caregiver. I want to take care of everybody. And I forget sometimes to take care of myself. Um, And I heard a thing on TikTok the other day. A guy was talking about how people talk about their cup being full and overrun and then it's empty. And he said, well, why do you want to be a cup? And I thought, well, because that's the way I've always heard it, right? what else would I want to be? You know, I want to, I want Jesus to pour into me and fill my cup and I want my, you know, I want to be able to share my cup with everybody. But then there's times that my cup gets empty and it's hard to find somebody to pour into you other than Jesus. And, um, he said, well, why don't you want to be a water hose? Water hose, you're connected. And then you turn the knob and it just floats and You don't have to worry about it running out. So are you connected? Do you spend time with Jesus? Do you take that moment every day to thank him for what he's given you? Are you a cup or are you a hose? This is a, um, this next segment, um, I find it, um, Kind of found it funny. It says, what's on your shelves? What's on your shelves? Right? If we were to walk the aisles of your life right now, what's on the shelf that you've never acknowledged? What small but sacred things are sitting dusty in the corner of your hearts, never counted? You know, That person who still checks in on you even though they don't have to. That friend, that mentor, that person that just blessed you every now and again drops you a text. Are you thankful for that? The devotional that you read last week that hit exactly where it hurt. The message that you heard on Sunday at church or on the radio station. You know, wasn't that a blessing? Wasn't it something you needed more? right when you needed it. That day you didn't feel like crying. If you're going through something, if you're going through a loss, whether it be a physical loss, a mental loss, any of that, did you make it today without crying? That's a blessing. The moment you laughed and forgot the happiness. You know, my grandma always used to say that laughter was the best medicine, that laughter You know, it could take away the heaviness, the dark cloud over your head. All you had to do was find a reason to laugh. And I believe that. I believe that. And I believe that these blessings count. I believe they matter. And I believe they should matter. And I believe that whatever blessings you come up with for the day, that they should matter. You know, I think about what's on my shelves today. And I've talked a lot about my husband in this episode and his family. And, you know, I thank my husband. I do. I thank him. But I don't thank him for the stuff that he does every day, for the stuff that he does. And we were talking, you know, we had long, long days this week at work because of getting ready for inventory and getting prepared for inventory and everything. And one day we were just we were standing in in the main aisle and we were talking about I was talking about how spoiled my husband was and talking about how he has. We have Bermuda grass. And if you've. ever seen Bermuda grass it's gorgeous but it's time consuming like you have to take care of it you know you have to feed it and fertilize it and water it and you have to mow it so many times so that it grows and continues to get healthy and there's a lot to it and if y'all want one day we'll do an episode on grass because I have learned more about grass than I've ever wanted to know but I don't thank him for that right because he's the husband and that's just his job and then I I don't thank him for, you know, people who pull up in our driveway are always like, God, you are so lucky. Your house is so beautiful. Your yard is so beautiful. You know, the neighbor tells him all the time to stop that, you know, he's having to get out there and work because of the way our yard looks. But I don't thank him for that, right? And he does a good job, but I don't thank him for that. And this past Christmas, I decided I was going to learn to play golf and golf is hard. And we've already discussed this, that when things are hard, I'm not the greatest at sticking with it. You know, and he every day he tries. Hey, do you want to go down and hit some balls? He just wants me to learn enough to go play with him. Right. And I want to. I really do. But. It's just so hard and it's so time consuming. And I don't know that I want to put in that effort, but he wants me to. Right. But I don't thank him for that. And then I get frustrated with him. Right. I get frustrated with him because he takes care of the yard. He takes care of the outside of the house. And. guess it's a double standard and he calls me out on it sometimes at least it makes him feel like it's a double standard right I get frustrated you know one time he didn't pick his clothes up and put them in the hamper so when I went to do clothes I didn't wash anything that was in the floor that was mean that was so mean of me like it didn't take me it wouldn't take me five seconds to bend over you know but it's the same thing I don't know. And he asked me if I was going to do it anymore. And, you know, I kind of snapped off at him and, you know, because he doesn't understand the hard work that goes into that and the, you know, the time that goes into it. But he goes, but I really liked it. It made everything look so nice and so organized and so put together. And it was so beautiful. And I was and the thought went across my head. Well, you never told me that before. It's one of His blessings that He didn't count. So, James 1.17 Every good and perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of the heavenly lights. Everything that walks in your path, everything that is there for this moment, every person, every song, every preacher, every moment, You should be thankful. Everything good. Every good thing. Not just the big things. You don't need to compare your inventory to anyone else's. What's small to them might be survival for you. Gratitude unlocks peace. Gratitude isn't just cute. It's powerful. When you thank God for the small, you position yourself to receive the big with humility. And I believe that to be true. I believe that instead of coming to God with your complaints or coming to God with your ask or coming to God with, you know, whatever has upset you for the day, I truly believe that if you speak to What you want to God in a grateful manner, or if you thank Him for the small things, not just the big things, that you're going to find a peace that you've never understood before, that you've never seen. You're going to find a peace that transcends all the problems, all the stuff, and everybody has stuff. Everybody has stuff. I have stuff. Deborah, who's with me, has stuff. The preacher that stood on the pulpit on Sunday has stuff. The person sitting next to you on the bus has stuff. The person in the car at the red lot next to you has stuff. But we can't let stuff... with our gratitude. We can't let stuff interfere with our peace. We can't let the small things that someone does to us or the small things that happen to us. And what's small to me might be huge to you. And that's okay. But you have small things. We just can't let stuff happen or stuff that happens to us Take away our gratitude and take away our joy because the moment we quit being grateful is the moment that every other word out of our mouth is misery or ungratefulness. Philippians 4, 6, and 7. Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and petition. With thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God will guard your heart. Let's read that one more time, right? Listen to the words. And think about that verse. Think about what you're going through today. Think about what you've went through yesterday and what's going to come tomorrow. For just a moment, think about it. Okay, now think about the moment you're in. Think about right now. In everything by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your request to God and the peace of God will guard your heart. Pray to Him. Thank Him for what you have and speak to what you need with a grateful heart. Please don't come forgetting what you want. Peace doesn't come from getting what you want. It comes from noticing what you already have. You know, it's hard this day and time to not compare yourself to other people. Facebook, Twitter, X, Instagram, TikTok, you know, people put on these facades of their life and But everybody has stuff. Everybody has stuff. And all you can do is pray for the stuff that you have. All you can do is pray for the sadness that you have or pray for the happiness that you want. All you can do is find your relationship with God. And in gratitude, you will find peace. In gratitude, you will find peace. Inventory of your blessings doesn't and won't change your reality. It changes the way you see it. It changes your perspective. It changes the way you see reality. It changes the way that you deal with that situation. It changes with the way that you see it. And I have been doing this for a while now. And in every situation, good or bad, I thank God first. I thank God first. And then I ask for help. Let's do a life blessing inventory, right? Let's do this together. So pause for a moment. Breathe in. What do you see around you? What can you name? I've got a voice to speak. I have someone listening to this episode. I have a phone or a mic. I have a car. I'm able to listen to this episode. I'm able to speak in this episode. I'm able to speak over you I'm able to share my gratitude and my peace that God has given me through all the years to you. I'm able to just do it. And that I am grateful for. I have a God who hasn't left me yet. When I was in addiction and in the drug houses, when I was dating a guy and he said, purposely wrecked his car trying to kill us both. When I had my son and I was lost and didn't know where I was at or what I was doing, as I continued to grow as a mother, as a woman, God was standing with me. He stood with me in the fire. He stood with me in the floods. And He stood with me in the flowers. He was always there. Make this a rhythm. Weekly, daily, hourly if you need to. Inventory check-ins. Reset your spirit. When you start feeling negativity in your life, when you start feeling negativity around you, when people speak over you or speak into you and you don't like it, tell them you don't like it. It's okay. Tell them you don't believe that. That God says you're loved. That God says you're a daughter of his. That God says that you will find peace. That God says that you are his. If you're in a waiting season, a hurting season, a weary one, this practice will anchor you. Not everything will change overnight, but your heart will start to change. On my journey as a young woman of faith, the bricks or the stones around my heart, they didn't fall apart. They didn't fall off just from one time. One minute. It took years. It took years to trust. It took years to be able to be grateful in the moment. It took years to love myself. It took years to find my identity and cross. And it took battles. It took battles. It took me standing on the battlefield. It took me kneeling on the battlefield. It took me saying, enough is enough, devil, and today is not your day. And I am no longer yours. But your heart can heal. And it will. It will find peace. Here's what I want you to take with you today. What small blessings have you been overlooking? What's one small thing that you have overlooked? What would shift if you treated every grace differently? Like it mattered. What do you think would change? What do you think would be different? Who do you need to thank? If it's God, then thank him. If it's a friend who's reached out to you, who's been there for you, who speaks life into you, then thank him. And if it's you, if it's you, if you got up out of the bed today, If you smiled at a stranger today, then thank yourself. I want you to tag us with one small blessing on our TikTok or in our Facebook page that you've noticed today or that you've noticed tomorrow or that you've noticed the next day. Let's flood the feed with gratitude. Write it, speak it, share it, steward it. Let's pray. Dear Father, thank you for every small blessing. Thank you for the coffee. Thank you for sunshine. Thank you for allowing me to sleep late this morning. Lord Jesus, thank you for lunch. Thank you for the few moments that I got to spend with my husband today. Thank you for the moments of laughter, unexpected peace, and simple joys in life. Help us to take nothing for granted. Teach us to count with clarity and joy and let our gratitude draw us closer to you. In Jesus name. Amen. So that's today's episode. I know it wasn't a back and forth conversation, but I hope that you've enjoyed it. Unrelated Sisters Truth and Grace Conversation. If it blessed you, send it to a sister who needs to be reminded that the little things matter. And before you scroll on, pause and count something, then count it again. I'll see you next time. Stay grateful, stay grounded, and stay in grace. We love you.