Blessing for Change

 

Yesterday’s post on my cup/mug of blessings prompted a deeper pondering of “blessings”. Barbara Brown Taylor is my go-to on this topic. She says “anyone can bless” and affirms this power of recognition of the extraordinary in the ordinary with these words:

“To make bread or love, to dig in the earth, to feed an animal or cook for a stranger—these activities require no extensive commentary, no lucid theology. All they require is someone willing to bend, reach, chop, stir. Most of these tasks are so full of pleasure that there is no need to complicate things by calling them holy. And yet these are the same activities that change lives, sometimes all at once and sometimes more slowly, the way dripping water changes stone. In a world where faith is often construed as a way of thinking, bodily practices remind the willing that faith is a way of life.”  (Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith)

All of us are capable of “bending, reaching, chopping and stirring” and hence all of us are able to embody and imitate the constant dripping of water which over time, changes things. We who are Kingdom bearers are instruments of change in very ordinary yet persistent ways.