It was the word All that got my attention.
"All God asks is for us to be open to the one hundred blessings placed in our life each day."
How can it be that 'all', meaning the only thing God would ask of me would be to be open to blessing? What happened to all the shalls and shall nots? Where was sin in this all? How could I have spent my entire life wondering if what I was doing was right or wrong when this statement says that the only thing God wants of me is to be open to blessing? I was so intrigued by this idea I made the decision to try living as though it were true. This choice was in some ways a no brainer: worry about 'sin' or simply be open to being blessed a hundred times a day! Which would you choose? Simple right?
Like all simple things however, it turned out to not be easy to actually live. For one thing, 100 is a lot! My logical brain broke down the number into a ratio of 100 blessing divided by the average number of hours of being awake and it came out to being aware of 6 or 7 blessings every hour! Finding and acknowledging 6 or 7 blessings every hour would mean paying attention- really close attention!
At first I was really lousy at this particular scavenger hunt. For one thing, I kept forgetting I was looking for blessings. As I became aware that it was difficult to pay attention to finding occasions of being blessed, I discovered the problem is that we are pretty much trained to pay attention to mistakes and difficulties. I discovered my mind could 'chew' on difficulties or mistakes endlessly and then I discovered that chewing on problems obscured blessings. Ah-ha! That discovery became a big bundle of blessing, but how do I make it different?
By nature I am both stubborn and a problem solver and sometimes this combination of traits is useful because I refused to give up until I at least discovered a way to make my scavenger hunt somewhat successful. Which is how I began talking to myself. Follow me around now - after two years of playing this game of hunting for blessings - and you will hear me say out-loud, countless times (I'm hoping it's at least 100), 'Oh thank you!' ' Oh, that was helpful, thank you!'
Saying thank you out loud was how I began to change my old thought pattern of paying attention to mistakes and difficulties. Saying thank you out loud meant I was using three of my senses each time I discovered a blessing: I 'saw' it; I spoke it; I heard myself. Using three senses each time meant I increased my learning by 3! Increasing my learning capacity this way for each newly discovered blessing meant I learned more quickly and became better and better at discovering blessing.
Discovering blessings all day long meant I was attaching myself to 'freely bestowed' goodness over and over again throughout my day. Attaching oneself to goodness this frequently quite naturally changed the thought patterns of negativity and discontent encouraged in our culture. Deliberately attaching oneself to moments of goodness a hundred times a day means that blessed energy enters you. Enters: becomes part of. Wow - talk about a natural energy drink!
Allowing one hundred small infusions of goodness to become part of my living, changed my life.
My life was not changed by the quote at the top of this page. My life was changed by the deliberate decision to live the meaning of the quote. My life was changed by a willingness to believe it's truth and therefore to not give up when living from it was initially difficult and so I needed to learn how to work with it's ideas. My life was changed by the willingness to be open and receive the goodness. My life was changed by learning that blessings are often quite small: a smile from a stranger; a 'remembering' that left to my own devises would have been a forgetting of cell phone, keys, sunglasses; a delight or wonder that I felt seeing clouds move across the sky or my glorious flowers growing wildly. My life was changed as I also became willing to accept and receive larger blessings. My life was changed as I began to understand that if other people were part of my blessings, perhaps I am to be one of their blessings.
Meister Eckhart, a mystic from the Middle Ages, said that if the only prayer you ever pray is 'thank you', that is enough. I am beginning - after two years of living this way - to understand those words as truth.
My blessing for you, are these words and a sincere hope you might join me in this scavenger hunt of blessings.
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