Blessed

Luke 1:48 (NRSV): Surely, from now on all generations will call me blessed.

At some level, our existence, from start to finish is passive. We begin and end our journey in utter dependence. We enter and we leave life in diapers, with small minds and small lives.  As babes we are cuddled, coddled and swaddled. As we age and again encounter our frailty we enter assisted living, then long term care which, ironically and mercifully, often turns out to not live up to its temporal aspiration.

In between these chronological benchmarks we live in the illusion of control, of independence. We collect and dispense, assemble and disassemble, construct and confab. We manage, manipulate and maintain. We “make something” of our lives.  But, at the end of the day (and our lives, at the end, truly feel like little more than a day), we have lived a small life in every sense of the word.

And in the midst of this small life there is a huge blessed reality—that we are unaccountably graced with God’s visitation—with the presence of Immanuel, God with us. And, while most of us will never be called accomplished or famous, rich or wise, we can all be known as blessed—as passive recipients of the grace and favour of the One who loves us surprisingly, remarkably and, at some level, indescribably.

Being known as blessed, from now on, by all generations, is not something we can work toward or accomplish. Blessing happens to us.  It arrives like an unordered Amazon package on our doorstep.  It is something we gratefully, in our dependent reality, recognize and receive with outstretched arms in all our glorious passivity. We are blessed!