The godly are showered with blessings. Proverbs 10:6
Have you noticed that “blessings” from God are not always clothed like blessings? Sometimes when they knock on our door we do not recognize them. Like peddlers, mendicants, little girls with cookies or young men and women with glossy literature we want to turn them away, give them a scrap of our time, be polite but hesitate to open the door more than necessary to converse briefly with them and then hopefully send them on their way to our neighbors. We don’t see them as blessings, but as nuisances and interruptions in our busy day of pursuing blessings by another more familiar name. We are too caught up in crossing things off our to-do lists so we can at least feel blessed, even though we really may not be blessed.
When blessings come, they are not only unrecognizable but they are also sometimes late, out of sequence and just not what we would affix as giving value to our lives. We are much more prone to bemoan the absence of blessings in our lives in the frustration of dealing with their delays and in so doing prove ourselves more ungodly than godly and anything but deserving. It is a catch 22 as they say, a paradoxical conundrum in which the very act of seeking a blessing has a way of dredging up the ungodly side of our nature that would threaten to disqualify us from the very thing we yearn.
“Showered with blessings” – showered? We think not, “Not in my life, not now.” If anything it may seem like a time of drought. The ground of our heart is parched and dry and the heavens seem brass. Showers of blessings – how can that be? Perhaps it is just not the season. But the rain does fall, Jesus tells us, on the just and unjust alike. And there is no rain without clouds. Could it be that we expect showers to come from a cloudless sky? That we have mistaken the season and in what manner showers of blessings must come.
Dark clouds and wind seem to dampen our days rather than bless them. But it is from them, which of necessity, showers of blessings are produced. Could it be that in our darkest times, when the plans for sunny days must be aborted that and we find ourselves scrambling to run for cover to salvage whatever we can that God is really soaking us in blessings? Could it be that the very experience that seems anything but a blessing may in reality be the bearer of good news and an invitation for us to open the door wide and invite them in?
Just as the ground that receives the rain does not immediately evidence its benefit other than softening the soil – and that in and of itself is a harbinger of blessing – in time a green shoot of life does appear as a long lost friend poking their head up in a crowd to delight you with surprise by their very presence.
Blessings then are out of time, out of sequence, usually delayed, often camouflaged and unrecognizable in dusk’s dimming light, easily rejected as a nuisance and not appreciated. Stormy skies that rumble into our lives have a way of eliciting from us ungodly reactions and thereby make us, at least in our estimation, unworthy of blessing.
But our consolation is in the mysterious ways of God’s grace. While we are being showered by God with blessing we neither recognize it nor deserve it and yet He is doing it nonetheless, and only time will fully reveal the extent to which He has gone to fulfill the truest longings of our heart.
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