Blessing is the lube of God working in the world. I used that phrase the other day and got funny looks from everyone, and of course it wasn’t assumed that I meant anything about car parts. So a better way to express it is that blessings are the middle man between God and what he is trying to do in the world.

If this is the case, it makes sense why God would bless Abraham to be a blessing. It makes sense why some of the people God blesses never really see for themselves the fulfillment of the blessing. It makes sense why being blessed comes with responsibility. It makes sense why blessing invokes a deeply interconnected set of events that carries from one to another. Blessings are when God moves and bestows his will on the world in which he created. These things can’t be contained within one individual but by their very nature get passed on.

Blessings are the middle man between us and God. It is through blessings that we hear him speak and see his will for the world. It is through blessings that we pass on that to others and the people around us. Blessing is its own sort of language; a language that speaks to our souls and something much deeper than our selfish desires. Blessings are how God keeps reminding me of the way it’s supposed to be and the way it can be if only I live in them and give them to others. It’s two parts that come together; speaking it and listening to it; reading and writing. You can’t say you know a language until you can read and write it, listen and speak it.

Those are just some thoughts I’ve been having about the idea of blessing in Genesis lately.