Last night I took a short cut that wound through one of the more affluent neighborhoods in our city. As I drove I passed a house that had a huge brick wall and a steel gate. The wall had a name inscribed on it – apparently the house was massive enough to warrant a name.
The house was called Blessing.
More interesting to me was the fact that this wall said blessing on it. A wall that says blessing.
Walls keep people out.
And they keep people in.
They isolate.
I have no doubt that all good things come from God – and a house is a good thing. But this house had a wall that they wanted to be a symbol, so they inscribed it. But all walls are symbols, even before they’re inscribed.
Once the gates of Blessing closed, no one could get to this person. And, likewise, they could get to no one.
This person saw their isolation as a blessing.
Maybe they prayed they would get cut off from the world. Maybe they didn’t want to get hurt by it anymore. Maybe they just don’t care about the needs of others.
Whatever the cause, what they perceive as blessing actually disconnects them from the way God designed us to live.
Which is why I think there are times I pray for blessings that God never gives me.
We have to realize that we interpret our world through a lens. It was formed as we grew up, by the media we intake and by the relationships and experiences we pour ourselves into. When we come to God and restrict him to operating within the assigned views of success and failure that we see in our limited experience we fail to take part in either his greatness nor his revolutionary plan for this world.
When Jesus prayed in the garden before his death, not my will, but yours be done, he was admitting the way he saw things as a human was through his lens. That he was in a set time and set place and had a way of looking with things that came from that. And his was said there was no need to die on a cross.
But he yielded his lens to a greater picture. It was the opportunity to be a blessing far beyond what one man should be capable of. It was the opportunity to take part in God’s redemptive plan for this world.
So I have to ask myself, how do I want to ask to be blessed? Does I want to further my way of life and in doing so risk cutting myself off from God’s plan?
Or do I really yield my view of what this world is – what success and failure look like – and ask for God to bless me in ways beyond which I could ever imagine.