K-Fam's journey through My Father's World

• Oct. 9, 2008 - The Meaning Of Being Blessed

I'd always thought of blessings as something good, something that made you smile and gave you comfort. A few mornings ago, I was reading my daily devotional in Nancy Guthrie's The One Year Book of Hope. This is a book I began reading two years ago when I joined a local pregnancy and infant loss group. I use the term "group" loosely as it consisted of just the group leader and myself.lol.

It seems I got sidetracked somewhere along the way because I'm just now getting down towards the end of reading it. I don't know why it took me so long to finish. Maybe God knew I'd be more receptive to some of the truths in this book further out from my loss...

So anyway as I began reading week 42 the title was "Blessing". As I read through the page in the early morning darkness, my eyes got bigger and bigger. I'd never considered that hardship or loss can be a blessing. I thought at first that maybe this was something the author was simply using to convince herself that her tragedies in life were a blessing, then I got to the next paragraph and here's what it said:

"The Hebrew word for blessed is ashr, which means 'to find the right path.' If you are surrounded by many confusing ways and you find the right way to go, then you are happy. This Old Testament idea of happiness has to do with orientation, perspective, and the discovery of what is meaningful in the midst of shallow, superficial options.

And this is what we need, isn't it-- to find the right way to go, to gain some perspective about what is meaningful? We're looking for a pathway lit by the radiance of God's face, a pathway that will lead us toward life, toward him. We want to be blessed."

Wow.

Wow!!

I am blessed by reading that. I no longer have to feel (inwardly) that because something is going wrong in my life that it automatically means I'm being denied a blessing. The situation that is upside-down may in fact be the blessing. I mean, I knew that, but seeing the acutal meaning in the original language makes it so much clearer.

How many times have I opened God's word and been amazed by something new? It happens over and over again.

That's awesome.