Being Blessed is a Story Not a State | Glenn Packiam
One of the more brilliant bits of parenting advice we received was to keep a journal for each child. Over the years Holly and I have recorded our children’s likes and dislikes, quirks and idiosyncrasies, and memorable one-liners and retorts. There were far more entries in their early years. But even as they’ve gotten older, we have made it a point of writing in the journals at least twice a year. At some point the entries became less like note taking and more like letters. We address the children personally, describing what we see in them and how we see God at work in their young lives.
They know these journals exist, but they don’t quite know what’s in them, and they know they are not to reach for them on the bookshelf. (So far, so good.) When our oldest, Sophia, turned thirteen, we presented the journal to her to read for the first time. We let her read the notes and letters we’ve been writing about her since she was born. She was mesmerized. For much of her birthday, her head was buried in the pages of the journal. All the while she would smile and giggle and call out quotes to the rest of us. Sophia had been given the gift of knowing a crucial part of her own story; she could see the origins of her identity. We will continue to write in the journal until she’s eighteen, and then it will be hers to keep. But we knew that these next years will be crucial for her as a cacophony of voices will bombard her, each one trying to tell her who she is. We want the Lord to be the voice that shapes her. So we are trying to use our voices as parents to echo His.
This, I think, is a picture of what it means to be blessed. It is to be taken back to the start, to have Father God show us what He saw in us when He made us. In fact, what we have been given in the Bible is even wider than that: it is God’s account of the story of the world, from the very beginning.
Our origin story is rooted in the origin story of the whole cosmos. God established blessing from the origins and foundations of the world. If we want to understand who we are and what makes us blessed, we have to go back to the creating, ordering, and blessing of the world.
When the Bible tells us the story of the beginning, it begins with a Person, God. “In the beginning, God…” All things have their origin in God. In the ancient world everyone knew that some god or collection of gods was responsible for the material world. They were not like people in our day, who imagine the world as a series of automated processes or random incidents with no divine involvement. For people in ancient times, the questions were not “Did god make this?” and “How?” but rather “Which god made this?” and “Why?” The questions of which god and why are massively significant, and these are the ones the Genesis account wants to answer most clearly.
Genesis reveals that there is only one God. In contrast to the many other ancient Middle Eastern beliefs, Genesis depicts no division of divine jurisdiction. The Israelites did not have a separate god of the sea, god of the land, or god of fertility. YHWH is set apart as uniquely powerful, greater than all other gods. As the lead character in the opening scenes, God not only exists but also acts. All through the opening passage, God is the only active character. There are no rivals. There is simply God, who speaks, forms, makes, calls, and blesses.
Moreover, Genesis shows that the sole sovereign God created the world on purpose and with purpose. Some ancient pagan stories saw creation as the result of a bloody battle among the gods, the result of mutated divine excretions, or the gods’ way of getting cheap labor around the universe. The God of Genesis, however, sets out to make the world carefully, deliberately, and even poetically. God made us on purpose and with a purpose in mind. Not for cosmic labor but for divine relationship.
Perhaps most striking, God blesses what He makes. God meant to make it, and He called it good. The word good has many meanings, but in some usage it has resonances with what we might call “beautiful.” In a very real way, all that is good and beautiful in the world is the result of God’s blessing.
Imagine the people of God living in exile in Babylon, not feeling very #Blessed. They strain their eyes to see something of God’s hand and train their ears to hear something of God’s voice, when all of a sudden they remember: This world was made by God! This tree, this stream, this flower, this fruit—everything that flourishes around them—flourishes because God has blessed it. The blessing of God on the material world would have been a source of consolation and a spark of worship in an otherwise difficult land of exile.
Good and beautiful. Is that how you see yourself? Maybe on a good day. But we often struggle to see ourselves as good or beautiful, let alone both. We’re too aware of our shortcomings or our plainness. I’m not really good; I’m a bit of a mess, actually. And beautiful? Well, I wouldn’t say that. Maybe just ordinary. The Genesis story grounds us in God. God Himself made us on purpose and for a purpose and blessed us by calling us good and beautiful. That is our origin story.
Being blessed is not a state—it’s a story. It’s an origin story. It’s the story of how you began and why. It’s the story of God the creator calling you into being on purpose and for a purpose. It’s the story of God taking delight in you and naming you as good and beautiful. It’s the story of God the redeemer pursuing you, calling you, and returning you to who He made you to be. The God who called light out of darkness calls you out of darkness and into light. In doing so, He brings you back to the beginning, to your beginning. This is where it starts: You are blessed.
Glenn Packiam is an associate pastor at New Life Church, a multi-congregational church in Colorado Springs. He also serves as the lead pastor of New Life Downtown, a thriving New Life congregation in the heart of the city. An ordained Anglican priest serving in a non-denominational church, Packiam treasures Christian practices that are both ancient and modern. He has a doctorate from Durham University, UK. Glenn, his wife Holly, and their four children live in Colorado Springs.