MISSING THE BLESSING

Dear Lord,
I didn’t understand.
I was always disappointed.
I imagined the blessing as
dramatic, bold, designed,
policied, procedured, daytimered, detailed,
calendared, sign-boarded, labeled, scheduled,
voice-mailed, e-mailed, megaphoned,
engineered, spreadsheet, high-tech, mapped, GPS’d,
advertised, store-windowed,
publicly acknowledged in product, print, on stage.

Towards the end of my life I saw that the blessing was found instead as……… ragged,
tattered, unwoven, disordered, cluttered
life threads in subtle colors,
Half-torn “post-its”, coffee-stained napkins,
Cluttered piles.

The children of God looked for Christ in the wrong form, in the wrong place.

I make the same mistake.




My web is woven like a nest, gathered
From scraps and twigs, creating a resting place of purpose… undertoned, understated,
recognizable only in remininesence.
Visible only when undistracted by busyness, planning, future goals.

The blessing is not found necessarily in the plan that happened…. It is instead buried beneath; the mistakes were allowed to create the best.
God was in charge all along.

Hard to let go,
Yes, we should still plan and still go, but look to the left, look the right, look into the face of Jesus in the sky.
It is blessed to catch the blessing at the time, but sometimes it can only be seen in the reflection of old age, illness, the face of a newborn, a snowflake.

LOOK, WAIT, DON’T ASSUME LIFE TO BE AS YOU SEE IT.

MAKE ROOM FOR GOD; MAKE ROOM FOR HIS MYSTERY.
He blesses us in the everyday, the bread, the fish, the wine at the wedding party.
Unassuming. Unpretentious, spontaneous.