How do you find your blessing?

How are you? How’s your heart in this season? Are you getting enough sleep? Are you finding enough space to care for yourself and/or your loved ones?

We may not equate this current global season we're all swimming in as a blessed one. Pandemics, racism, fires, floods, business loss, hardship, quarantine, lack of connection, political mess... so many interesting and horrific things are happening in the world, and perhaps even to you, that may have left you scratching your head or with a beaten-up heart, wondering where to from here, and what next, and when will this be over, and what will things look like when it is done?

But even here, in this, as it is, there are blessings to be found, for you. Life is never just one thing, good or bad, beautiful or brutal. It's a mixture of everything all at once, as Glennon Doyle would say, "life is brutiful." Goodness is tucked into the most unlikely places along the way, and our experience of them is not dependant on our behaviour or status or achievement, but on our willingness to see and find and receive it.

Blessing is part of the fundamental fabric of the creativity and abundance the world is teeming with. And it is yours to find in every season.

Even if you haven't been good or wholesome according to someone else's standard, and even your own if you get honest with yourself, blessing is still for you. Even if you feel like you don't deserve it or need it or you haven't been able to find any for some time now, blessing is still for you. And your enemies? The things you feel are against you, and the people who seem to want to condemn you and come against you? There's blessing in that, too.

Blessing is not a word to use lightly. I don't believe that healing is a blessing, or that car parks are either. I don't think that some people are blessed and other people are not. I believe that some churches and leaders use the concept of blessing as a manipulative tool for control and submission and that others use it to explain away things they can't explain.

Blessing has little to do with being good and wholesome, and reward and accolade. You can't earn a blessing. You can't achieve a blessing. It's not a transaction: you get this, for doing that. Bless-ed is a state of being, and the purpose of blessing is to wake up - awareness. It's a flow of understanding.

Blessing is all around you and within you. It is Divine presence; goodness that flows forth from divinity. It's something you decide to join in on. In ancient Jewish mysticism, this picture was used to convey its nature: two kinds of proverbial vessels received blessing from the Divine Source. One was open at the top so that it could receive, but closed at the bottom. Blessing and goodness couldn't go anywhere once trapped inside, and it self-destructed. The other vessel was open at the top and the bottom, available to the interconnective networks at both ends, and blessing flowed through like a river running free. Blessings are not static gifts, they are a flow of grace.

Maybe that's why Jesus said that you should bless those who persecute you. Not for any other reason than to keep the flow alive within you, keep it moving and vibrant, especially when things are trying to pull you down.

Perhaps blindness to it happens when you cap one end of your life, try to keep blessing all to yourself so that you finally have that sense of safety and security you believed you'd have in the midst of hoarded blessings. But it becomes like a stagnant pool, where water that once was full of life becomes rotten and mouldy and eventually, poisonous.

Let it flow, friend. Receive the blessing, and let it work its way in your life until it flows onto the next life you touch. That's how it works. Blessing is here for you, to set you free, to bring you life, to heal you, to open your heart to wonder and grace, and connect you to others.

Even here, even now.

(This post is an excerpt from The Practice Co App series called "Even Here, You Will Be Blessed", available to download for iOS and Android! It includes daily devotionals, FREE Mindful Prompt notifications (no subscription needed), phone wallpapers and more. Start with a free trial or subscribe to get access to each new series as they come out.)

Mindful Prompt*: Take a few moments to think about your life as it is right now. Look into it, around it, and through it, search until you find a point of blessing - goodness and abundance. And then remind yourself of this: It is not there as a reward for good behaviour. It is there as your birthright as a human being, here and now, no matter what. (*Included every day, in the app now as a FREE daily notification - no subscription necessary!)

Written by Liz Milani.
Instagram: @thepracticeco