This New
Jersey businessman (in the Burlington County area – see map) had been engaged
in a pretty recently adopted, and semi-serious venture, for about five years
near the end of the 19th Century. Johnson Oatman, Jr. must have been
thinking some about how his life’s physical benefits so often appeared to be
inadequate, and so he tried a different strategy to evaluate himself and his
surroundings. Johnson had much that he cherished, though his four verses
suggested this calculation was not always clear-cut. Was it only a curiosity,
this songwriting that Johnson was practicing that generated “Count Your
Blessings” (alternately known as “When Upon Life’s Billows”) in 1897? Certainly
by the end of his life, one could say that it didn’t appear that way.
Johnson
Oatman was a well-known name in the Lumberton, New Jersey area, though you
might have needed to specify whether it was Junior or Senior you pictured, and
thought about how one name fed off the other. Johnson, Senior was reportedly
the best singing voice, as well as a reputable businessman in central New
Jersey, two attributes that no doubt impacted Johnson, Junior’s life. The
younger Johnson followed in his father’s spiritual and business footsteps as an
adolescent and young man, being ordained as a minister and taking part as a
merchant in his father’s business. He’d apparently been at this up into his
mid-30s, when he began to expand into songwriting, and it couldn’t have been
long before others took notice, with the prolific output this effort showed. He
wrote some 5,000 hymns by the end of his life in 1922, indicating he was
composing several per week. That “Count Your Blessings” was published in a
songbook for children could suggest he was trying to impart some wisdom to
young people regarding how unfair earthly life might seem. He stayed in the
business world, rather than completely devoting his life to church ministry,
perhaps because of the experience working in commerce that his father had
modeled for him. Could that choice have made an impact on his testimony in “Count
Your Blessings”? He writes of challenges, as a guy engaged in industry might,
in all of his verses. Though apparently successful, he must have winced a few
times, seeing the greater success of others (…’lands and gold’, v.3), and
noting how his own experience was not without hurdles (…’life’s billows…tempest
tossed’, v.1; ‘burdened…load of care’, v.2; and ‘amid the conflict’, v.4).
Maybe it was wisdom his own father had first passed along to Johnson, which
said to consider the positives when you started to notice the negatives. It
sounds like something the younger generation might need to hear from a pair of
Johnsons old enough to be their father and grandfather.
How
often does one need to re-examine the columns of checkmarks and ‘x’s? Was it
the first time Johnson Oatman, Junior had done so, when he was 41 years old in
1897? I think I had done so countless times by that age, how about you? Perhaps
when one begins to pass along some of the good things, you begin to really see
their value. An oft-forgotten blessing may need only a little dusting off for a
needy individual to welcome its arrival with renewed joy. Can you picture a
40-something fellow, who’d seen his share of blessings? By that time, maybe Johnson
had observed others who needed his perspective – challenges, sure, but
outranked by those things in his own plus-column. It may have made his own
blessings seem new again for him to engage in this accounting exercise. How’s
your accounting sheet look today?
See more
information on the song story in these sources: The Complete Book of
Hymns – Inspiring Stories About 600 Hymns and Praise Songs by William J.
Petersen and Ardythe Petersen, Tyndale House Publishers, 2006; Amazing
Grace: 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions by Kenneth W. Osbeck,
Kregel Publications, 1990; 101 Hymn Stories, by Kenneth W. Osbeck,
Kregel Publications, 1985; and Then Sings My Soul – 150 of the World’s
Greatest Hymn Stories, Robert J. Morgan, Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2003.
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