Count Your Blessings

The chorus is an instruction and a confession: “You gotta sit back and count your blessings / You gotta name them one by one.” Deitrick Haddon adds that nobody can “take the credit / For anything that GOD has done,” and that he does not know how he “made it over.”

The verses supply the evidence. Haddon cannot forget “Detroit city” and a demo tape he carried around trying to get folks to hear him, with people hating on him “in JESUS name.” Had he quit, he says, “you wouldn't hear me on this radio.” The third verse points the same gratitude at ordinary things: who woke you up this morning, who keeps your heart pumping, plus a warning about pride while “driving bentleys and flyin in jets.” Wanting fatter pockets is fine, he allows, but attention belongs on “love, life and family.”

The closing verse becomes testimony: a roof overhead, still alive “when I could have been dead,” and forgiveness “over and over again.” Psalm 103:2, which says to forget not all his benefits, James 1:17 on every good gift coming from above, and 1 Thessalonians 5:18 on giving thanks in all circumstances line up with the song's insistence that credit belongs to the Lord.