Ten Blessings

Over the past few years, I have tried to take time to name ten blessings of the day.  I think that the idea is that I am supposed to do this every single day.  Sometimes I am pretty consistent; other times I have forgotten, often for days at a time.  However, I think that it's a simple, and potentially powerful thing:  just to take time to name ten blessings ever day.

I learned this practice from a member of my last parish.  Harriet was a retired airline executive who had traveled all over the world.  She was also the daughter of a minister who had grown up in a small town in Minnesota.  When I met her, she lived within a few blocks of the church, in a small house decorated with Norwegian Rosemaling.

Harriet once gave a moving Adult Forum on her travels, and how she found a place to worship no matter where she was in the world.  Her Forum was called "The communion of Saints."

I say that I learned this practice from Harriet, but it was not until near the end of her life that I learned it.  Fiercely independent, she found herself in a nursing home.  When I was planning to visit her with communion, her executor told me that Harriet had this faith practice.  Every day she named ten blessings.

"Make sure you remind her to do this when you go to visit her," she said.

So I did.  I got out my communion, and I went to visit Harriet at the nursing home where she didn't want to be.  We talked, we shared communion, and I asked her what her ten blessings would be that day.

When you are living in a nursing home, it's not so easy to find the blessings.  She had to think about it for a bit, and be creative, and resort to the simplest things, like being alive.  I remember that one of her blessings that day was a box of chocolate.

Ten blessings.  Every day.  I have never read about it in any book.  It's so simple.  Anyone can do it.  If you can count to ten, you can name ten blessings.

The Jesuits have a practice called "seeing God in all things."  Somehow I think this practice relates to that one.  There are times and places where it is easy to see God.  But in all things? How do you do that?  Start by naming ten blessings, wherever you find them.

A woman who lived close to my church lost her home to a fire.  We took up a collection to help her.  When I called her on the phone (I didn't know her personally), she said that the fire was, "the worst blessing."  I was taken aback.  She said the blessing was in the outpouring of care from her neighbors.  She saw God in all things, although I am not sure how she managed it.

When I think of Harriet's life, I think of the ways she was blessed.  She was a pastor's daughter from a small town, and she ended up traveling around the world.  But she never married, and I suspect sometimes she was lonely.  She had blessings and she had burdens.

And every day she named ten blessings.  Maybe some days they were so small they didn't seem like blessings.  Maybe other days she could have named twenty.

But at her funeral I claimed the promise of the saints:  the promise that they have received more blessings than they can count, more than the stars they cannot see.  We can't hold that promise in our hand, but we can name ten blessings.

Every single day.

Why Read the Bible

I am reading a book right now about faith practices, and it is making me think about my faith practices.  The book is about deepening faith commitment, and it makes the case for 'stepping up' with greater resolve in several areas of our lives, including, prayer, Bible reading, worship and witness.

But even though I believe in deepening our faith commitments, and even though I think it is positive to resolve to spend more time in the prayer, Bible reading, worship and witness, I do, on occasion, find myself talking back to this book.

Take, for example, reading the Bible.  I am all for reading the Bible more often, just as the the author of this book commends.  There is a wonderful opening story in this book about a successful mountain climber who happens to be blind.  He is successful because he has learn to listen.

So, listening.  Reading the Bible is listening to God.  So far, so good.

But, when we listen to the Bible, what do we hear?  What do we expect to hear?  That's my question.

The writer of the book sounds as if he believes that by reading the Bible, he will find wisdom to help him live a Better Life.  He will find commandments to obey, he will find Good Advice.  And it's true, he will find these things.  He can read the Ten Commandments and the Book of Proverbs and James, and find what he is looking for.

But I have to say:  that's not the main reason that I read the Bible.

Why read the Bible?  I mean, really:  it's a huge book with small print, and many kinds of writing.  There are stories and laws and advice and genealogies.  There is history and there is prophecy.  Some of it is exciting and some of it is puzzling and some of it is downright troubling, if you are honest.  Reading the Bible is all kinds of comforting sometimes, but it also opens you up to all kinds of questions.

I have heard the Bible in church since I was a little girl.  I also learned wonderful stories in Sunday School:  David and Goliath, Abraham and Sarah, Noah's ark.  I learned how Jesus fed 5,000 people, how Moses led the people out of slavery, how Jesus healed those who were blind or deaf or lame.  I heard the stories of the prodigal son and the good shepherd.

The first time I tried to read the Bible without help, I was in high school.  Church camp had made of me an enthusiastic believer, so I cracked open my Bible and resolved to read the whole thing, starting with Genesis.  By the middle of Leviticus I had given up, disappointed in myself.

Why read the Bible?  It's a huge book with small print, and if you are honest at all, it is going to raise as many questions as it answers.  You are going to find out about the Walls of Jericho, and how they came tumbling down, but you are also going to find out about how the armies went in and killed every single person after that.  You are going to learn about how Jesus fed 5,000 people, but somewhere along the line you might wonder about all of the people who are hungry now.  You are going to hear words like:  "For God so loved the world that he gave his only son," (John 3:16), and you are going to hear words like "Love your enemy, and do good to those who persecute you."

Why read the Bible?  Why listen to these words, these stories, even this advice?

It's not a self-improvement project, at least not for me.

The Bible is this great big book, and it's about God, and it's about us.   It's about a God so in love with us, God's people, that he is willing to do anything -- including, in the end, to come and be among us.

Inside the Word, this complicated, messy, confusing book -- is the Word, Jesus.  The heart of God.   The one who tells us who we are.