I was soon to learn that my idea of a blessed life and the way to obtain a real blessing were significantly different than what I thought, and it would cost a lot more than I thought.
I Want to be Blessed But I’m Scared to Limp
A man after his own blessing
A man rises early to work, hoping to be blessed by the fruit of his labour. His dream is to one day accumulate enough that work becomes unnecessary: a life of “passive blessing,” where his real life can finally begin.
That has been the goal for the majority of my life.
The plan was simple:
Work really, really hard. Learn, improve, try again and again, and then once more. Earn my blessings one ounce at a time. Use exactly what I need. Store the rest for my future.
Through my own strength and sheer grit, I will reach a point where I have so many blessings that my stores start to overflow.
That’s the point where I no longer need anyone or anything else.
I’ve accumulated enough to live in comfort and finally pursue what I want. Simple enough, right?
Unfortunately, I was soon to learn that my idea of a blessed life, and the true way to obtain it, were far from what I imagined, and it would cost far more than I expected.
bekhorah vs berakhah
Before we go any further into the pursuit of blessing, we have to ask: what is blessing, anyway?
Growing up, I thought blessing meant comfort. More money. More freedom. More security. Enough stored away that I could finally stop striving and start living.
But that’s not what the Bible says about blessing.
To see the difference, look at two Old Testament words: birthright and blessing.
The birthright (bekhorah) was the inheritance of the firstborn son. It was a legal right that included a double portion of the family inheritance, leadership of the household, and all the responsibilities of becoming the next patriarch.
The blessing (berakhah) was something else entirely. It wasn’t wealth or possessions. It was a father’s covenantal declaration over his son: God’s promise of who you are meant to become.
That difference matters.
The birthright was about what you inherited. The blessing was about who you became, and the fruit that change produced.
I spent years chasing what I thought was blessing. What I was really chasing was a comfortable birthright.
I wanted comfort. I wanted rest. I wanted my life to revolve around whatever made me happy.
So I was willing to work hard now to buy an easy life later. I forgot that whatever I stored up here might lead me to hear the voice in Luke:
“You fool! This very night your life will be demanded from you. Then who will get what you have prepared for yourself?” - Luke 12:20
God doesn’t give water to dams to hoard; He gives it to rivers to carry onward. That’s one of the first things you notice on the road to blessing: God changes your why. He makes you a river.
And to receive that berakhah, we have to go back about four thousand years.
The First Limp
Before I lived, before I ever wanted to be blessed, someone lived a very similar life.
Jacob was the kind of man who went and took what he wanted.
At birth he grabbed his brother’s heel, trying to beat him out of the womb, which earned him the name Jacob, “holder of the heel,” or “supplanter.” He used his brother’s hunger to rob him of his birthright. He tricked his father to steal the blessing too. Rather than face the consequences, he fled his brother’s wrath and ran to his uncle’s house. There he worked seven years for the woman he loved. Tricked into marrying her sister, he worked another seven. All told, his uncle got twenty years of labour out of him, most of it unpaid, and still Jacob kept working to earn his blessing. Then he ran from his uncle too, trying once more to save himself by his own strength.
Caught between an uncle chasing him from behind and a furious brother waiting ahead, he came to the ford of the Jabbok with nowhere left to run.
I can picture him looking up at the sky, asking God what else he had to do to be blessed.
God’s answer was simple: stop running, and limp.
Jacob wrestled with God. God dislocated his hip.
Only then, with no work left to do and no strength left to run, could he finally be blessed.
Dislocation is Freedom, God is Freedom, God is Dislocation
Jacob had always wanted the blessing. But he couldn’t truly receive it until his hip was dislocated.
He needed to be pulled away from the thing he relied on most. Song of Solomon paints the same picture, when the Shulamite longs to draw nearer to her beloved:
“Draw me away! We will run after you. The king has brought me into his chambers. We will be glad and rejoice in you. We will remember your love more than wine. Rightly do they love you.” - Song of Songs 1:4
She asks to be drawn away, from her old life, her old ways, everything holding her back, so her beloved can dislocate her from all that keeps her from him.
That kind of drawing away, of fully embracing God, is what finally opens us to His blessing.
No one shows this better than St. Mary, in her complete surrender to God’s will:
Then Mary said, “Behold the maidservant of the Lord! Let it be to me according to your word.” - Luke 1:38
Another man who wrestled and wasn’t blessed
Not everyone answers the call of the beloved. The rich young ruler came to Christ seeking blessing, and shows us what refusal looks like.
In the Gospel of Mark:
“Now as He was going out on the road, one came running, knelt before Him, and asked Him, ‘Good Teacher, what shall I do that I may inherit eternal life?’” - Mark 10:17
And Mark says Jesus looked at him and loved him. That’s surely how He looks at all of us: longing to save us, asking us to accept the dislocation that leads to His life.
The man seemed perfect. He kept the commandments, he strove, he wrestled with himself and achieved much. But when it came to wrestling with God, when God reached to dislocate him from his love of money, he refused.
And he walked away sad.
I like to imagine him walking home, pulling on his silk robe, lighting a fire, pouring his expensive wine and hoping it might comfort him. He had looked true blessing in the face, and walked away.
I think about this man sometimes, and wonder how many times I’ve done the same.
He took bread
I think we walk away because our hearts have grown so distorted that we’ve lost sight of God’s plan for us, and why He wants to bless us at all.
Nothing captures the meaning of blessing better than the institution narrative in the liturgy:
He took bread into his holy hands, which are without spot or blemish, blessed in life-giving. He looked up towards heaven to you, O God, who are his Father and Master of everyone, and when he had given thanks. He blessed it, He sanctified it, He broke it and gave it to his only saintly disciples and holy apostles, saying, “Take, eat of it, all of you, for this is my body.”Liturgy of Saint Basil
These four movements are, in a way, a formula for receiving God’s blessing.
Step one, and it is always step one, is to be taken into His life-giving hands, to rest fully in Christ. There is no other way but Him.
“Abide in Me, and I in you. As the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, unless it abides in the vine, neither can you, unless you abide in Me.” - John 15:4-5
Step two is to receive His blessing: your true identity in Him, your true purpose in Him, a purpose that isn’t about your comfort, but about the two steps that follow.
“If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation.” - 2 Corinthians 5:17
Step three is sanctification, where He dislocates still more of your old life and fills your heart with love, until the things that once pulled at you lose their hold.
“Every branch that bears fruit He prunes, that it may bear more fruit.” - John 15:2
And the last step, the reason for the blessing in the first place, is to be broken and given to others, just as He was.
“Unless a grain of wheat falls into the earth and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it bears much fruit.” - John 12:24
A man after God’s blessing
This year Christ has dislocated me from several things in my old life, and as He keeps working, I’m beginning to see why He did what He did with Jacob.
Only when Jacob learned that the one he needed to rely on was God, that the only blessing he needed was God Himself, did he become what we see years later: an old man surrounded by twelve sons, a source of blessing for them all.
Blessed. Sanctified. Broken for many.
Him, his God, and his limp.
So embrace the limp. Let God dislocate whatever stands between you and Him, and be blessed, for it is your Father’s good pleasure to give you the kingdom.
“If anyone desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me.” (Matthew 16:24)
Written by
Saved Rich Ruler
