The Gift of Blessings

It is only Monday and I am grateful to share that I have received three very specific blessings. Two from people I know and one from someone I know from her writings. The first was a simple note that was on my desk at the church when I arrived on Sunday morning. It was from one of the members of our congregation and it simply said:

Dear Ed,
Keep the Canon firing through the lens of a poet.
Peace be with you.

And then she signed it. Those 10 words that make up the heart of that note were such a beautiful gift to me that morning (and still today). I was grateful to see her a little later in the morning and share how grateful I was for the blessing.

The second was a beautiful email of affirmation of one of the things I do for our local denominational body. It wasn’t just a “thank you for doing this” but instead it said:

You do such a good job with these! I don’t tell you enough. (Have I ever told you?) Anyway thanks for this ministry!

And then was this video shared by Diana Butler Bass in her post from Monday morning that I didn’t get to until Monday night. She shared a video created by Brother David Steindl-Rast’s organization, Grateful Living. It is a visual and spoken celebration what it means to bless.

So, my plan tomorrow is that I am going to send some very specific messages of blessing to some people in my life. I wish I could send ones to everyone I know but there’s not enough hours in the day to do that. But I can do for some. And maybe each of you who reads this can do the same to people in your life - share something(s) with others that are specific of why you are grateful that they are in your life or what they bring to the world. See what happens.

The video above ends with this beautiful encouragement:

May blessings help to sharpen your taste for the gift of life
in its immeasurable facets.
May you go ever more blessed, ever more able to bless.

And since I know that one thing that I can do to bless others is share what I see through my lens (keeping the Canon firing through the lens of a poet), here’s some blessings from the last few days.

It felt like the illuminated clouds were embracing the tree

Patterns in the water...so beautiful

I loved the subtle colors and the hazy sliver moon

This and the next were taken only a little ways apart from one another but it is the same flooded bench only a few minutes apart. Yet the difference...

I loved the motion and energy in the water on this one

And then the blessing of this fuzzy friend as she welcomed me home today with her plush elephant, Sebastian. (And in case you are not familiar with Sebastian… he is the "stuffed fren” of the Thoughts of Dog page-a-day calendar from We Rate Dogs (the greatest social media feed on the Internet)).

Oh…and MaryAnn and I had a AMAZE AMAZE AMAZE¹ conversation about the novel Project Hail Mary in preparation for the movie release this weekend! Click here to check it out.

Grace, Peace, Love, Hope, and Joy,
Ed

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1. This will make sense if you read the book…which you should