Blessing, Expectations and Wiggle Room

“God doesn’t bless us just to make us happy; he blesses us to make us a blessing.”

— Warren W. Wiersbe

I’ve had times in my life, which you may or may not be able to relate with, where I have felt so incredibly blessed, purely because my expectations were out of step with reality as it panned out; to the point where my expectations were a lot lower than the point of reality I arrived at. Then, gratitude and thankfulness crowd out anything negative.

When our expectations are out of step with reality it normally occurs the other way around. We normally elevate our expectations over and above what reality can deliver us. We become disappointed, angry, envious, and resentful.

But blessing—the experience of being blessed by the situations that occur to us—is largely a matter of sufficient wiggle room. If we have no room to move and our expectations exceed or are close to what reality will deliver, there is very little experience of blessing possible in the good things that happen to us.

It is always far better to right-size our expectations by not getting too far ahead of ourselves. Blessing is not about what we deserve. Blessing is about what is appropriate for our lives now. And only God knows the answer to that one.

Wiggle Room In Providing Blessing

Just as it is a beautiful thing to be blessed, it is just as beautiful thing—and perhaps abundantly more so—when we are made or positioned to be a blessing.

God wants us to feel blessed, so we in turn will be motivated and inspired to bless others that haven’t been blessed. It is important to God that we would want to bless others out of love and devotion rather than out of duty or for reciprocation.

The beautiful life of love, when it is lived, brings glory to God in the highest.

This is one of the reasons why being Christian is a winning initiative for life. I don’t think a nonbeliever could be as practically happy as I am in my belief in the Lord Jesus. And this happiness we can speak of isn’t conditional on being blessed, but it is inspired and fed from those things in everyday life we accord to be blessing.

Not Being so Needy

When we live independent lives under God, yet we have a beautiful interdependence about us, where we look to where we can bless others, blessing comes back into our lives as a matter of course. We leave such blessings alone to cohabit within our lives, without making much of them. The more we do for others out of love and not as duty the more wiggle room God has in blessing us with the blessings he deems that we require.

We ought to always be desiring what God decrees is best for us.

We want to exemplify the opposite of neediness; or at least if we are needy we are needy of God, alone. We turn blessing upside down and become seriously enthused to be the instigators of blessing in others’ lives, ensuring that God’s will is done to the extension of their prosperity, in faith that God has our prosperity in his hand.

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When our expectations are sensible we allow God wiggle room to bless us by realities pregnant with abundance. When we look to bless others, somehow God blesses us with much more than we expect. Regarding blessing, it’s as if God says, “It’s not about you; it’s about them. Forget your own blessing; go be a blessing to someone.”

© 2013 S. J. Wickham.