BEING BLESSED IN 2015

What occurred to me today is how we think about being “blessed”. If our only definition of the word blessed is “happy” we have a very incomplete picture of the word. If we think of the word “bless” in terms of “increase” you can travel much further with your understanding. Getting a little further down the road when you feel weary is a good thing.

Of course the words bless and blessed have different meanings but one of the meanings speaks to being prospered. The minute you say the word prospered or prosperity people begin thinking about success in financial terms. Even the phrase, “getting ahead” is thought of in financial terms which is also very limiting.

If being blessed either means a person is happy or getting ahead financially then tragically very few people could consider themselves blessed. If, however, we could use the word increase synonymously with bless we might finding that we are far more blessed than we would acknowledge.

Increase means to multiply, enrich or enlarge and in its prevalent usage today, it doesn’t have the happiness/financial baggage attached to it. We understand the idea of something increasing with greater ease than we do the concept of something or someone being blessed.

If being blessed in your life is equivalent to experiencing increase in your life then growth would equal blessing. Growing in your faith is being blessed. Paul in 2 Thessalonians says to the church he is trying to encourage in Thessalonica, “We ought always to thank God for you, brothers, and rightly so, because your faith is growing more and more and the love every one of you has for eachother is increasing.”

This is a very easy thought to swallow. What’s unpalatable to us is the idea that growth can come without happiness, financial prosperity, or some other feel good thing along the way. We typically don’t equate that kind of growth to being blessed and subsequently our praise for the learning is very shallow.

If only we could look at how we weathered a tough set of circumstances and say they weren’t curses, they were blessings. They were blessings because there was an “increase” in the area of understanding, tolerance, self-control, goodness, knowledge, perseverance, or brotherly kindness in our lives. Perhaps we aren’t as nearsighted anymore and our worldview has grown making our faith bigger not smaller. As a result we just might be more effective at living a Christ-centered life! Wouldn’t that be worth celebrating?

I don’t know what tomorrow holds for me but I can say without hesitation that I know it will be blessed beyond compare. I’m making space for the unknown to fill up my life with surprises. I’m stretching into the New Year (albeit a little late) thankful and with my mind wide open to all the new learning I know God has for me. That will be a blessed life.