God bless you and what not...

Dear all,

"God bless you."

We have all heard this phrase at some point in our lives.

A lot of us who are Christian will use it constantly. Some of us even tag it at the end of our emails to replace such things as "sincerely" or "regards".

I personally love when we use it right after another person sneezes.

But what do we really mean by this phrase? We would hope that we don't just throw it around as Christian jargon when we are around our Church friends. We should know better than to use something pertaining to the Almighty in such casual banter.

When we say it, we should mean it. 


When we say the phrase we are actually saying a prayer. I like to see it as a short, strong, ninja prayer. It's like a little bolt of blessing being thrown on to the person which we are saying it to.

For example

When it's to affirm a person's presence: "Hey it was really good seeing you today, God bless you."

When it's expressing thanksgiving: "You saved my life against those zombies, God bless you."

You can even pray for someone you don't like: "You took my parking space, God bless you."

Prayer, is efficacious regardless of the length. But the intention of the "God bless you" is important so next time you decide to throw it out there take a spilt second before you say it and mean it with your heart and mind.

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Being a Blessing

Since we are on the topic I also wanted to share more on blessing. God blesses us and we can see it daily. Just look at how we are able to wake up in the morning and stumble out of bed and meet the glorious sunrise with fervor and excitement (ok so not all of us are like this). We are blessed everyday and I believe that the Lord blesses us for two reasons:

1) Because He loves us like crazy.

2) Because He, in turn, wants us to be a blessing to others.

To bless others... crazy... in other words we have to be a blessing. Our lives should bless other lives. I believe this a reality worth living by.

What I mean by your life being a blessing is simply equated to the fact that your life makes this world better. And we should know that for this to happen this takes effort, it is not something that automatically happens. This effort can be described as the actions that we do to achieve this end, whether we do it knowingly or unknowingly. Let's call this concept, goodness. Check out this mathematical explanation:

You + life + goodness = Blessing

You + life + goodness = Non existence (where did you go?)


You + life + goodness = Dead :-(

You + life + goodness = Pointless existence

Please note that the amount of goodness you do does not affect the outcome of you being a blessing. Small amounts of goodness still equals a blessing. Even if you do something as small as voluntarily going out of your way to tell someone how nice they are (granted they are nice and you are not just butt-kissing), congrats you are being a blessing. The cool thing is that the more goodness we do, the bigger the blessing we are to people. Go big or go home.

However, if our lives make someone else's life worse (please note that in the case of those who are mentally/physically sick or in other situations that render them incapacitated in any way, the suffering they go through and the burden they place on their loved ones is actually an opportunity for growth in holiness, therefore being a blessing in disguise), then we can say that we could be the opposite of a blessing. See below:

You + life + bad = This

What are you? Is your life blessing someone else? Are you making the world a better place?

Love,

Vince and Cay