Day 102 of Your Year to Wellness; Blessed and Highly Favored

Being The Blessing

I live in a town where there are a ton of folks who are blessed and highly favored. I don’t mean that they are any more favored or blessed than anyone else, but that’s what they will tell you. I meet them in Starbucks and even at the grocery store when I’m paying for my groceries.

Perhaps you’ve met them too. These are the folks you can greet by asking how they are doing and they well take one step back, raise their head high and pronounce, “I am blessed and highly favored.”

“Oh, okay,” is what I typically say as I take my change from them. From time to time I’ll ask someone why and I am often rewarded with an invitation to the best church or the most blessed church or something of that sort. I stopped asking why and began to ask “How are you blessed and highly favored?” My answer came in the form of a list of stuff that the favored person received from the Lord.

Now, I’m not picking on the pious, nor am I trying to harm God’s anointed, I have a point. Usually when these folks tell me just how blessed they are, they don’t look particularly joyous. In fact, they look mean.

Well yesterday I met someone who really did leave me with a feeling of being blessed and highly favored. Yesterday, while dropping my daughter off on campus, I stopped for a hot cup of tea. When I came out of the building, I saw a homeless man sitting outside with all of his belongings attached to his bike. I asked if I could buy him coffee and he smiled and said, "I don’t want to be an imposition." I thought, “Wow, I got tea and old English.”

The man was smiling which of course made me smile even harder. I told him that there was no imposition among family and he thanked me profusely. (I think he may have even helped with my English; note the use of the word profusely.) The smiling man said that he would be able to fill his thermos with real coffee and said that I had given him enough for a donut as well. Then he asked if I would like a donut with the change. I was thinking that the donuts must be really cheap and then I was thinking, “What just happened?”

I gave the man money for coffee and he was offering to buy me a donut. I felt renewed and rewarded by the return of kindness. I felt blessed; which is the knowledge that God is enough.

When people tell me to have a blessed day, I want to scream “What other kind can I have? The day is blessed; it is our calling to be a blessing to someone else.”

Now, I’m about to preach; If we really do believe that prayer works and that God’s will can be done on earth as it is in heaven then we must stop with just saying it and we must begin to make it so.

Be the blessing and the change and the joy you want to see.

Don’t just proclaim that you are highly favored, live like you are.

·         How can you make a difference?

·         Whose life can you touch?

·         Are you smiling?

·         Share your light and love

·         Live what you believe

Be you, be well, be the blessing.

Bertice Berry, PhD.