I am big on words. I love to talk
with people, I love to write, and I love to learn more about both. For some
reason, I feel like I’ve been seeing a huge increase in tweets, posts, and
articles from people who are “blessed.” Got a new job? Blessed. Aced that test?
Blessed. Score ten points and won a game? Blessed. I don’t take anything away
from anyone, especially when they choose to be happy, but part of me starts to
wonder, “How did that experience bless you? Are you happy? Sure. Are you in a
good mood since you thought you bombed the test and you didn’t? I’d hope so.
But, in the grand scheme of life, are you any more richly blessed because of
that test or that game? Or do you just think that’s what you should be?
In our
society, words become so depleted. Blessed is a strong, boisterous,
multi-layered word, and too often, I feel like it gets reduced and tacked on to
the end of a tweet. I’m not trying to be pretentious and say that because I’ve
survived what I’ve survived I am the judge of who is blessed and how. Quite the
opposite. But I’ve been down a road that doesn’t feel so blessed. I’ve been
down a road that seems bleak, cursed, tragic. More and more as I read these
articles and hear people talk, I want to play devil’s advocate and ask, “Well
what if that didn’t happen? Would you still be blessed?” What if you failed
your test? What if she dumps you? What if you lose a parent..or two? Are you
still willing to post that you are blessed? Do you even know what that word means?
A simple Google search for “blessed in the Bible” references Ephesians where “by
grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is
the gift of God.” There’s nothing about luck there. There’s nothing about
winning or losing. By the gift of God, by the gift of grace, we are blessed.
That’s a pretty powerful reference and seems a heck of a lot more powerful than
what we’ve been assigning to it.
I am
blessed to be living each day with love. By the grace of God there is love in this
world. There is also sin and anger and greed and hate. Are we blessed to live
in that world too? Are we blessed when a parent becomes sick? Are we blessed
when we are frustrated, angry, and broken? Of course we are. We’re still here.
We’re still capable of love, and kindness, and forgiveness. I don’t need to buy
a bracelet at the store or tweet about it to know that I am blessed. I think
one problem is that we have made blessed become synonymous with lucky, happy,
or fortunate. That’s all well and good but blessed should not be equated with
anything so trivial, so mundane. As a society we like to make things fit into a
nice, clean category—a little bubble that shines up exactly how we like it. We
also live in an era where we feel the need to post every accomplishment and
accolade, really we boast every
accomplishment and accolade instantly on social media and we need to define it.
We need to put a nice little bow on our accomplishment, so we call it “blessed”.
The funny thing about life, and grace for that matter, is that it isn’t neat.
There isn’t a bow that fits it correctly. It is messy—we are messy. That’s the
beauty of grace and the beauty of love—Christ’s love. We don’t have to be shiny
and blessed to receive that love and that grace.
This post
is meant to be less of an attack on the overuse of the word and more of a
defense of its sanctity. When I lost my mom, I surely didn’t feel blessed. I
felt broken, crushed, and empty. The same thing happened when my dad died,
probably tenfold. What kind of blessed person loses both parents within a year
and a half? What kind of blessed person questions and doubts and blames? A
normal person. A grieving person. An imperfect person. When you are so immersed
in pain and sadness, you don’t really feel much else—except more pain and
sadness. You don’t realize right away the people you still have around you. You
don’t realize the warmth of an embrace or the comfort of a prayer, but it’s all
there. It’s always there. We are blessed at our lowest point just as we are
blessed at our highest. There is no contingency. Life isn’t a game that once we
reach so many happy points then we become blessed. Because we are capable of
love, of grace, of forgiveness, of heartache, that’s why we are blessed. Looking
back on the hours, days—years (wow, years) since I lost one and then another parent,
I have been enriched. Challenged. Triumphed. Celebrated. Frustrated. Loved.
Most of all, I have been…blessed.
