“Behold the Lillies”

The kitchen drawers broke some months ago. At first I identified that the problem was a simple matter of getting a couple of replacement rubber washers. I felt optimistic. Fast forward a couple of months, and I’m sat on the kitchen floor trying to create a singular Frankenstein version of a kitchen drawer using fragments from across the entire drawer unit. Success was not forthcoming, and my hours communing with the drawers concluded in their last rites.

In place of the drawers, Sarah and I built and repurposed an IKEA bathroom shelving unit, and – with relief and triumph – we returned the kitchen to functionality.

And then, last week, one of the kitchen cupboard doors came off in my hand.

Besides being very funny, this turn of events feels like it nicely demonstrates the idea that “if it’s not one thing, it’s another”. There will never be an end to the to-do list; there is no magic place of arrival into a life that is free from problems.

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There was a recent podcast interview with Bill Gates, in which Rory Stewart and Alistair Campbell ask Gates if he feels powerful. He says no. A man with the access, influence and wealth of Gates perceives limitations sufficient to answer no.

In contrast, Paul Alexander – the man in the iron lung – died last month. The moving account of his life, is testament to a man who managed to embrace limitation and live in the midst of it. He’s a man that, if asked if he felt powerful, I could imagine saying yes.

I wrote a note to myself last year that says “Be blessed in your blessing or be blessed in your need”. There is blessing in both the experience of plenty and the experience of lack. But we are (and I am) often too insatiable or too insecure to know the blessing of plenty, and too proud or too distressed to know the blessing of lack.

Be blessed in your blessing or be blessed in your need.

We judge Gates for his response because it demonstrates an inability to be blessed in his blessing; we admire Alexander because his life reveals a man able to accept the blessing of being in need.

The beauty of this principle of course, is that at any one time we are always in a state of blessing because we are always in states of either blessing and need, or of both.

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In Luke 12, Jesus says “Behold the Lillies” (or in the NIV “Consider the wild flowers”). It’s a passage about not worrying, and putting trust in God. To my mind, it’s Jesus himself saying there will never be an end to the to-do list, that there is no magic place of arrival in life that is free from problems. We cannot work or buy our way out of the preoccupations of life.

In view of that, our option is only to choose to be blessed. And interestingly, the verb “behold” or “consider”, calls us to tend to that experience of blessing.

In a famous relationships study, there was a clear correlation between the longevity of relationships and the choice of those in them to tend to their partner. When one person points out the window to a bird and exclaims “Look!”, does the other person get up to go and share in the looking? Or do their own preoccupations win out?

It makes me think that blessing isn’t actually about circumstance, but about relationship. Blessing is a state of being available to us in our identity of being known and loved by God. It isn’t about what we do or do not have, it’s about what becomes available when we tend towards the One who attends to us.