Beyond the blessings.

Blessings have always seemed to be the symbol of the favor of God, of being in His will. And when they’ve rained down upon my head, I have to say that I have felt incredibly loved by God.

Not that I deserved the blessings – never, ever will that be the case. But maybe I felt that, by receiving them, I’d reached some sort of apex. A finish line, of sorts.

That’s how I used to think. Now I know differently.

Blessings are not what bring fulfillment to this life. If you don’t believe this, think back over the blessings in your life. The new house? It’s beautiful, wonderful, exactly what you’d dreamed of.

But at the end of the day, when you lay down to sleep, it’s still a house. With responsibilities, chores, and pressures built right in. And eventually your family will outgrow even the new house, and you’ll want a larger, nicer one.

A promotion? It’s what we all want, what we work so diligently toward. But again, it’s a job, and as with any job, there are multi-faceted issues that make it seem less than a blessing on many days. And one day, even that dream job will appear stale, and you’ll find it no longer satisfies.

We always want more.

The same is true with our spiritual blessings. Just beyond blessings, lies another place. A place we don’t like to talk of much, let alone visit.

Brokenness.

When we reach that point, that’s where we truly meet Him. Whether walking upright, or crawling in on our hands and knees, we stumble into His presence and find the true will of God. Those are the moments we realize we are in His perfect will.

It may not always be the most comfortable spot to be. It may not be the place of importance or stature we thought we wanted.

It may take us outside personal comfort zones and force us into situations that are foreign and unfamiliar. But it’s in those places we find new levels of relationship with God. Blessings are a sign He loves us. In spite of all our faults, our failures, our inadequacies, He loves us still.

But brokenness is a sign we’ve tapped into a new realm of relationship.

“So I went down to the potter’s house, and I saw him working at the wheel. But the pot he was shaping from the clay was marred in his hands; so the potter formed it into another pot, shaping it as seemed best to him.” ~ Jeremiah 18: 3-4

Think of Abraham. Isaac, the son of his old age, was nothing short of a blessing straight from God. But as Isaac lay on the altar of sacrifice, Abraham was brought to a place of brokenness.

The blessing was no longer enough. It was only after that time of brokenness that Abraham was brought into a new realm of relationship with God.

And what about Job? No one would ever dispute that blessings were abundant in Job’s life. If blessings were a sign of favor, well, Job certainly had favor.

But it was only after losing these blessings, and coming to a place of brokenness, that Job was at last lifted to a new realm. A place he would never have reached had it not been for brokenness.

Brokenness leaves us transparent, needy, and vulnerable.

It also leaves us in a place to be reshaped, remolded, and fashioned into vessels He can truly use.

“Can I not do with you as this potter does?” declares the LORD. “Like clay in the hand of the potter, so are you in my hand?” ~ Jeremiah 18:6

Beyond the blessings…