Blessing

“but the Lord your God turned the curse into a blessing for you because The Lord your God loves you”.   Deuteronomy 23:5 

Blessing – This word is barak.  To receive a blessing in the Old Testament is to receive something favorable from someone greater.  The paradigm of this action is the transmission a of blessing from God to Man.  Throughout the Old Testament, the central idea of God’s blessing is that bountiful life depends solely upon the goodness and faithfulness of God.  God is the only source of blessing to the extent that God gives life itself.  No man, no ritual, no religion, no other power is capable of giving and sustaining life.  Amazingly, God is not stingy with His desire to offer this blessing.  He does not have to be talked into giving it.  He is anxious and willing to provide blessing to all who trust Him.  This verse speaks most eloquently to those of us in recovery.  We know the curse of our addiction.  Yet God promises to turn that curse into a blessing for no other reason than that He loves us.  Our addiction can become the sacred curse, the one thing in our lives that brought us to our knees, forced us to admit powerlessness and find God’s grace.  A blessing in disguise.  By the way, this word also means “to kneel”.  Isn’t that exactly what we had to do when we finally came to the end of ourselves?

A priest once told me that were it not for the numbing effects of our addictions, we would probably all have committed suicide.  The temporary anesthetic enabled us to finally face our powerlessness and seek help.  The purpose of the addiction, from God’s perspective, was to get us to the place where we were used up and ready for His blessing.  But addictions have no power to give life.  They are lies of the highest magnitude, disguising death as something worth having.  God offers us a complete turn around, taking what was a curse to us and turning it into the doorway to His grace.  Maybe that’s why James says that we should count it a blessing when we fall into temptation.  Each temptation is a reminder that God took our personal hell and made heavenly joy from it.

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