Receiving God’s Blessings
I’ve written before about the difficulty of receiving God’s blessings freely and with gratitude. I still wrestle with this, especially on days when I read the news. While so many people in the world are suffering, why is it that I am blessed with a comfortable home, a loving marriage, the children I dreamed of, work I enjoy? It often seems nonsensical, and I find myself wondering when things will fall apart. At the same time, I know in mind, heart, and spirit that this is not who God is. He isn’t setting me up.
My life is not perfect, of course. I have or have had my share of loss, illness, financial strain, difficult relationships, even abuse. Compared to those of many women, my burdens have been small. Bearable. And God, while not the cause of any of them, has certainly used them to strengthen my spirit and character, to show me I can trust him. He has been faithful.
I often have to remind myself that God delights in giving us the desires of our hearts. In fact, I believe the desires of our hearts often line up with his will for us. It’s logical. We are all created in the image of God. He knit us together in the womb, knew us before we were born (see Psalm 139 and also Jeremiah 1:5). We are wired the way we are so that we will glorify him. All our gifts, our uniquenesses, our most innate desires and loves were hand-picked by him. If we walk in step with this idea, comfortable with who he created us to be, we ought also to be comfortable with the things we are hardwired to desire.
Let me take you on a quick journey to illustrate.
For most of my twenties, I lived a very transient life, always changing apartments and roommates, even cities and states. Between the ages of nineteen and forty, I moved something like nineteen times. Nineteen times! Since my husband and I were married ten years ago, we have moved seven times. At the ages of forty and forty-two, respectively, we bought our first house. We were late bloomers. We moved from apartment to rented condo to temporary housing with family in two different states, to an apartment during graduate school in another part of the country, to a rental house for a job in yet another city and state, and finally into our own purchased home. The three years I spent in the first home I finally owned were precious, but it still didn’t feel permanent. We talked about moving overseas short-term for my husband’s job a lot. But eventually, that door closed pretty clearly, and when it did, I was hit by a sudden, deep-seated homesickness.
I wanted to go home, to the city we’d met in, to the state we loved and missed. I wanted to finish raising our kids there. I wanted to walk in its woods, stand on its lakeshores, do life with old friends, see family more than once or twice a year. As I examined these feelings, it became pretty clear that I’d been harboring them all along, deep down. They had surfaced occasionally, but because there was nothing I could do about them, I moved past them each time.
Living away from home taught me an important truth–we can make home wherever we are. At the same time I embraced this truth, though, I still longed to return to my geographical home. And I carried the tension between those two truths for a long time.
When it became clear that we wouldn’t be going overseas any time in the foreseeable future, my husband and I discovered we felt the same, and we agreed to turn our focus toward going home. The possibility seemed a long way off. It would mean getting a transfer, and more than likely not to the city we wanted to return but at least to the other side of the state. And even that opportunity was likely years away.
But God.
Two short months after we had that conversation, a transfer to our home city suddenly became available. We held our breath. My husband was fifth in line for it, seniority-wise. All five people in front of him would have to turn it down.
They did.
We found out the same day my husband was scheduled to fly there, where our daughters and I had already been visiting family for two weeks and were waiting for him to join us. We returned to our adopted city, put our house on the market, and started looking for one to buy. Finding our forever home seemed like another impossibility. We had a long list of desires for that home, and the real estate market was just about as crazy as it gets. For months, there was nothing that even remotely fit the bill.
But God.
The day before we packed out to return home for good, a home better than we had imagined came on the market. We arrived home two days later, looked at the house the following day, made an offer, and now we’re waiting to close on the home we hope to live in for the next several decades. There have been some bumps in the road, but God has clearly been present every step of the way. We are in awe.
I still struggle every day with the ability to believe that God is blessing us so freely, so richly. I worry that the door will suddenly slam shut, and we’ll lose the house before we close on it. I know we don’t deserve it–we haven’t earned it. It is only and all by grace. And it is not easy to receive all of this blessed change with open hands. I keep telling myself that it must not just be my dream–it also must be his plan, and we have to stay open to whatever it is he must have for us here because he is never purposeless. I remind myself of the sparrows he cares for, and how much more he cares for us.
I’ll probably spend the rest of my life learning to receive his blessings with open hands and to simply give thanks instead of worrying and questioning. I envy the people who seem to so easily rest in abundance. But my struggle to receive also keeps me humble. It keeps my gratitude strong.
has loved the written word for as long as she can remember. A former English teacher turned editor, she has spent the past twelve years in the publishing industry. A writer herself in the fringe hours of her working-and-homeschooling mom life, Harmony has a heart for leading and coaching aspiring writers. She is the owner of The Glorious Table and cohost and producer at The Relatable Homeschoolers podcast. Harmony lives in Michigan with her husband and two daughters. You can find her at HarmonyHarkema.com and on Instagram @harmonyharkema.
Photograph © Christophe Dusabe, used with permission
