My heart has been especially heavy this week. My second cousin, in her late 30’s, was diagnosed with stage IV breast cancer. A more distant teenage cousin passed away unexpectedly. A 19-year-old girl Bryan and I know lost her fight with cancer. I cried while reading a story about thousands of Ugandan children who suffer from “nodding disease,” which causes seizures and has led parents to tie their children to trees to keep them safe – as if starvation and war weren’t enough in Uganda.
 
I have been praying daily for all of these people and their families. This morning, I started to feel like my prayers have been an ongoing petitionary sequence of “please Lord,” so I made an effort to subsequently thank God for all of the blessings in my life.
 
Thank you Lord for our home. Thank you for all of our food. Thank you for my loving husband. Thank you for my three beautiful children. Thank you for the health of all of us. Thank you for all of our wonderful parents. Thank you for both of our jobs. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
 
After praying this, I felt intensely guilty and literally could not continue praying. The stark contrast between “please Lord, be with my cousin while she fights for her life” and “thank you Lord for our health” made me want to crawl into a tiny hole of shame.
 
This has been a “struggle” for me for a while. I don’t even want to say it because even that feels guilty; to suggest that I struggle with feeling “too” blessed sounds outright insulting to those who are struggling with much bigger things. That said, I have to admit that this “struggle” is a challenge to my faith.
 
I’ve always disliked the word blessing. I think of “blessing” as something that God directly gives you. So, if I consider everything I have to be a blessing in this sense, it means that God has chosen to give me all kinds of wonderful things and has chosen to withhold those things from others. There is no way I can reconcile that. I’ve had to conclude for my sanity that this sinful world has led to extremely varying levels of pain, and that’s not due to God directly giving some people things and not others. I believe He intervenes to give things and take things away for various reasons, but that we have no way of knowing when that is the case. For that reason, we just have to give thanks for everything, as the Bible says, while not trying to determine the immediate “reason” behind every blessing (or lack thereof).
 
With this rationalization, I get by. But I still have a complaint for God. Blessings in this world – whatever their immediate reason – are horribly distributed.
 
This morning, I literally couldn’t pray another word because of the tension between those contrasting sentiments of sorrow and gratitude. My mind went blank. And then I heard this:
 
If you feel guilty for your blessings…maybe you aren’t doing enough with them.
 
If you feel guilty for your blessings…maybe you aren’t doing enough with them.
 
No, I didn’t literally hear God’s voice. (For the record, I never have.) But as much as ever in my life, I felt the Spirit putting something specific on my heart. So much so that it literally took my breath away for a moment.
 
I suddenly realized that I wouldn’t feel guilty if the output of blessings from my life equaled (or exceeded) the input of blessings I have received.
 
If I spent less time “struggling” to understand why I’m sitting on a pile of blessings and more time being a blessing to others, I would find joy rather than guilt.
 
If I spent less time worrying about how to raise my kids to simply feel grateful and more time teaching them how to translate that into action, they would learn joy rather than guilt.
 
As long as what we have does not equal what we give, the imbalance should result in discomfort. It’s far more common to hear people talk about the need to eradicate the guilt of blessings in order to enjoy life’s God-given abundance. I agree that God wants us to find joy in our blessings. But I’m now seeing that the joy He wants us to find in them best comes from passing them on to others.
 
Do you ever feel guilty for your blessings? Maybe you aren’t doing enough with them.