No “deserving it” or preparations needed. This blessing is nibbling around the edges of a realization: I am too human again today, so God must be God.Ī blessing comes to us like a gift. This blessing cannot control the outcome. This means simply turning whoever it is we need to bless over to God, knowing that God’s powerful love will do what our own feeble love or lack of it won’t.” So we begin with the impossible work of surrender. Without insisting that our truth be known. “Without insisting that everything be straightened out right now. “We must bless without wanting to manipulate,” she writes. Madeleine L’Engle describes the posture we need to begin this hard work in her book A Stone for a Pillow: Journeys with Jacob (H. And in the devastation of the weeks and months that followed, I would need to learn to bless my beautiful, terrible life as it was. All my beautiful plans (More books! See the pyramids! Another baby!) had been reduced to rubble. When I was diagnosed with stage IV cancer at age 35, I realized how much I needed a richer kind of blessing. We want to feel masterful and loving and complete, but we are threadbare. We care for an aging parent or little humans clamoring for our last bit of energy. What happens when our lives are proof of very little except that things have come apart? We get divorced. A blessed person is that perfect combination of luck and hard work.īut so often, we are not #blessed. A blessed person expresses gratitude to others but secretly understands that she deserves the good fortune she has earned. In this account, a blessed person has conquered difficult circumstances, mastered emotions, and overcome obstacles.

Much of this stems from its understanding of being #blessed. It is the catchphrase of the self-help age.Īmerican culture has enduring theories about what makes someone successful, enviable, and whole. #Blessed would be cross-stitched on pillows, hand-lettered in whimsical fonts for living rooms, and tattooed into the tender skin of so many forearms. I titled the book Blessed, not knowing that #blessed would become one of the most popular hashtags on Instagram. Yes I did.)Ī decade ago I wrote a historical account of the modern American idea that, with the right kind of faith, we can get what we deserve. (Did I recently see a bazillion dollar yacht christened with the name “2 Blessed 2 Be Stressed”? Yes.

Christmas card professional photoshoot where the laughing family wearing matching chambray shirts is piled on a couch in the middle of a wheat field? #Blessed.

Blessed by Kate Bowler