When Blessing’s a Curse

Beauty has an irony about it. It looks great, but the person enjoying their looks will also ‘enjoy’ the notoriety of stalkers and gawkers. Likewise, living in the rich Western world brings many comfort blessings, but the irony is we’ll have the health problems that go with the overbalance of such ‘blessing’.

Attractiveness is a bane for the attractive person, apart from what they see in the mirror, or the admiring glances they find welcome.

I heard a missionary to Malawi mention once that he used to ask the locals to pray for his Australian friends; “they have so many temptations,” he would tell them.

Such blessings are tied to the need to establish and maintain self-control if they’re to be enjoyed.

It is easy to see, here, a paradoxical sense of Ecclesiastical theology. Great things, and privilege, are not always what they seem.

When we feel particularly deprived of blessing it does us well to remember this eternal truth.

***

Having said the above, it’s still up to us to enjoy our blessings; the gifts God’s bestowed on us.

Even better blessed are we when we strike a blessed balance in our use of such blessing; enjoying them in appropriately scarce quantity, so they remain special.

© 2011 S. J. Wickham.