Life is so beautiful. Life is so hard.

Kate Bowler, “Death, the Prosperity Gospel, and Me“

I struggle with the meaning of blessing. It sets up a false binary between being good (and being blessed) and being bad (and being damned). I know this is a false binary. “Good” people have bad things happens, just as “bad” people have good things happen. There is a randomness to blessing. Blessing defies logic, history, philosophy, and faith: as if blessing can be earned, gained, bought, lost, and/or traded. Is luck the result of hard work or blessing? (Yes, and.) Where does opportunity fall on the blessing spectrum? (Smack dab in the elusive middle between damned, on one end, and #blessed on the other). What is the relationship between bootstrap mythology and blessing? (I have heard it said you have to have boots to have boots straps. I am reminded that none of us do this life on our own.)

Like Bowler, I have been fascinated by prosperity theology, and as such, the concept of blessing. Her fascination has driven an award-winning, accolade-receiving career as an academic, writer, and more. My fascination has fueled a Ph.D. studying wide-awakeness, church membership and theological exploration of the prosperity gospel, a voracious self-help book reading appetite, and a blog musing about gratitude and other prosperity-adjacent concepts comprised of hundreds of posts. All that understood, I know a few things for sure about blessing. Blessing is more likely to happen when we pay attention to our world—our awesome, wonderful, cruel, heart-wrenching, wonderful, brutal, amazing world. Blessing is a fluid, powerful, energetic, graceful, soft part of life’s falling apart and coming back together. Blessing, at its absolute best, is abundant, fierce, accepting, and inclusive. Blessing is ultimately about love. The inhale and exhale of love.