Collaborating With God
I’ve generally thought of blessings as being transactional. I do my part, I pay my dues, I show that I’ve been obedient and faithful and righteous and then Heavenly Father steps in and rewards me with a blessing for my efforts. It hasn’t always been obvious to me that there is a clear connection between what I do and the blessing that follows. For example, I pay my tithing, and then... a miracle happens... and I find a $20 in my coat pocket that’s just enough to pay for the taxi ride. These kinds of blessings are, well, miraculous. It’s impossible to follow the chain of causality between me paying ten percent of my income and a $20 bill showing up in my pocket at just the right moment. But it might be more appropriate to view blessings as being collaborative. We can think of a blessing as being a roadmap or a blueprint. God gives us a glimpse of what life could be like, and then He invites us to work with Him to make it happen. If God says, I bless you to have a pleasant and joyous attitude, this is a goal for us to strive for. The key to having a pleasant and joyous attitude is not to miserably fast and grudgingly go to eleven meetings on Sunday and read the scriptures until we can’t see straight in the hopes that at some point God is going to zap us with this pleasant and joyous attitude. If we want to get that blessing then we need to work for it - not by drinking the bitter cup of grim obedience but by finding things that we find pleasant and joyous and embracing them with our whole heart, might, mind and soul. If God blesses us to prosper financially, He’s not telling us that we need to join some multi-level marketing scheme and read self-help books over and over and manifest until we’re blue in the face and just will the corvette and the trips to Maui and the suitcases full of cash into existence. No. God wants us to get out and hustle and draw up a budget and pay off our debts and save and invest. I know that there are blessings that we neither earn nor deserve, that there are miracles that no amount of prayer and planning and up-and-at-em attitude are going to conjure up, that there are righteous desires and heartfelt dreams that never seem to materialize. I know sometimes we find that $20 in the coat pocket, and sometimes that $20 gets stolen out of our purse. I know that sometimes the whole ward fasts together and the cancer is defeated, and sometimes the whole ward fasts together and the cancer wins anyway. I know that God blesses us in ways that we cannot explain and we cannot begin to understand, and that sometimes God withholds a blessing despite all of our faith and our effort and our goodwill for reasons we cannot explain and we cannot begin to understand. But I also know that if we look at blessings from the Lord less like a slot machine that we pull with random acts of faith and get rewarded with random blessings, and more like a partnership, in which we and the Lord both work together to bring about the promised blessing, then we will find ourselves much more richly blessed, because we will be able to see how our efforts and the Lord’s grace combined together to make the blessing happen. If in our morning prayers we ask the Lord to bless us with a good day, then let’s go out and make the day good, and if we do so with the spirit of collaboration instead of transaction, then we are far more likely to see and feel and be the blessing that we seek. When God has a Blessing for us, we could just as easily say that He has a marvelous work and a wonder for us to do. There are many blessings that God gives us without any clear connection to the work that we are doing, but there are many more blessings that He holds out for us, like pictures on the front of a puzzle box, and He can’t wait for us to start picking up the pieces and turning those blessings into realities.
