Blessings

 

You will eat the fruit of your labor; blessings and prosperity will be yours. (Psalm 128:2)

 

          Someone asked about what blessings I’ve received in the past week, and to be honest, I couldn’t think of any. Of course, I know that every breath we take, and every heartbeat is a blessing. I try to keep in mind that even the things that I don’t think of as blessings are probably blessings, but those aren’t really what the questioner is asking about. I could have mentioned my moonflowers, or the superabundant (from my perspective) harvest of fennel seeds that I’m trying to harvest to keep them from producing more fennel plants – and then use.

          Instead, I used the blessing of the topic of blessings to consider the nature of blessings. Some blessings are big, showy, exciting. They’re they things we usually think of when we think of blessings. Turning water to wine would be one of those sorts of blessings as long as you like wine better than water or if you were somehow obligated to come up with wine. It wouldn’t be much of a blessing for me, though.

          There are also what we might call recipe blessings. Today, this ingredient is added to your life. Tomorrow, something else is added. Two weeks from now, some heat gets turned on. It stays on for a month, and other ingredients are added. Eventually, you find yourself with a healthy, flavorful blessing.

          A similar blessing is the garden blessing. You put something aside, or perhaps even throw it on the ground as you walk along. You might or might not water it, but over time, there’s something growing in your life. You’re not sure what it is… or maybe you are sure, and it’s not something you want in your garden, like the lemon balm I accidentally planted (I’d meant to keep it in a container.) There’s now a lovely plot of the stuff in my neighbor’s back garden. Then you discover that you have a use for it, and suddenly, your “ugh” turns into a “Yay!”

          Another comment I came across today is the oft’ asked bit about how God can let bad things happen to His creation. But if it is through the bad thing that good is enabled to grow or take place, then even the bad thing may be a blessing. That’s part of the reason that I think of COVID-19 as a blessing. It has given me opportunity and motivation to grow as a person.