“Bless you!”
Over several years I have been using this familiar phrase in my conversations, or I have offered “blessings.” Recently, I wanted to examine what blessings are more closely.
Through my practice of Christian Science I have come to understand that all good is from Spirit, God. So, God is the source of all blessings. And the act of blessing goes well beyond the kindness of saying the words “bless you.” The blessings we are able to impart are God-impelled expressions of good, not personal initiatives, with great meaning and power.
The word “bless” in various forms appears hundreds of times in the King James Version of the Bible, including statements from Jesus, and from God. Numerous times throughout the Scriptures God is recorded as blessing people. In fact, Jesus showed us in his teachings and healings that God continuously blesses all creation, including each one of us, imparting goodness but never sending harm in any form. As the Bible says, “The blessing of the Lord, it maketh rich, and he addeth no sorrow with it” (Proverbs 10:22).
In “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,” Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer of Christian Science, describes the great span of the good that belongs to God: “All substance, intelligence, wisdom, being, immortality, cause, and effect belong to God. These are His attributes, the eternal manifestations of the infinite divine Principle, Love. No wisdom is wise but His wisdom; no truth is true, no love is lovely, no life is Life but the divine; no good is, but the good God bestows” (p. 275).
These spiritual, limitless attributes of God are also reflected by every one of us, as the expression of God. These attributes are blessings from God. We don’t create, own, or personally generate them. Nor can they be taken from us or lost in any way. And as the outcome of understanding that we reflect all of these attributes, we each express the diverse gifts of Spirit in our individual way, as the Bible puts it (see I Corinthians 12:4-7).
One of the beautiful things about God’s blessings is that they are limitless and all-inclusive – limitless because they are of God, who is infinite, and all-inclusive because no part of God’s creation is left out. The love of God embraced and expressed, like a ripple reaching every part of a lake, touches all who are open to the blessing.
In the spring of last year, the phrase “a wider sphere of thought and action” kept coming to thought (see Science and Health, p. 265). I felt that my “sphere of thought” was already pretty wide. In my practice of Christian Science I strive to stay informed about global issues and pray about them. The Monitor is my favorite news source, and I love that “the object of the Monitor is to injure no man, but to bless all mankind” (“The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany,” p. 353). As I pray, I expect healing and resolution.
So I prayed asking God how I could broaden my sphere of action. The answer I got was to serve in my local Christian Science Reading Room, where people can purchase or study the Bible and Science and Health, the Christian Science Quarterly Bible Lessons, Christian Science periodicals, as well as other literature – and pray. I felt that such service was a perfect answer for me!
And so it has proved. This has blessed me with the opportunity to bless others, blessed our Reading Room with increased hours, and blessed our community members with greater opportunities to come in and dig into the healing ideas shared in the books and magazines. Everyone who stops in expresses gratitude for our presence.
“The Lord bless thee, and keep thee,” the Bible says (Numbers 6:24). How awesome and inclusive that we are all being blessed and kept by God! There is no limit to how God loves us. We can each cherish and share blessings, as impelled by God.
