As Jesus was walking along, he saw a man who had been blind from birth. “Rabbi,” his disciples asked him, “why was this man born blind? Was it because of his own sins or his parents’ sins?”
John 9:1-2 NLT
https://bible.com/bible/116/jhn.9.1-2.NLT
Being sick for several days can truly have you amazed that first morning you wake up well.
Some of our greatest blessings go quite unappreciated until we experience their absence.
We have so much to be thankful for that we haven’t even realized or recognized yet!
And if we are living through the realization of a missed or absent blessing that is challenging us today — how amazing it was that we had something so sweet and precious that we can now appreciate it in the trying times. It won’t be dark forever, and whatever blessings you are currently missing won’t be stolen away from you forever. They might just show up to you in the morning in a slightly different form than before.
Let’s be grateful first for today’s blessings and today’s challenging realizations so that we can be gratefully active and humbly reverent — in the right measure and time. Let’s be grateful second for realizing the blessings of days past, for the very same reasons.
And let’s not forget the hope that lies just past the night, the sun breaking through the clouds, the yellow and pink beginning to show on the morning’s horizon as new blessings await.
And mostly of all, let’s not forget ther God from whom all blessings flow, and give Him honor and praise, when He gives and when He takes away. Amen.
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Without the blessed blindness since birth, the man in John 9 wouldn’t have experienced the miraculous healing of Jesus’s spit upon his eyes. Many of us would buy nature rather forgo both the blessed affliction/trial and avoid any thought of God “spitting in my eye” — or we might even encounter the affliction and consider it a curse and say to ourselves, “that God if there is such a thing, has spat in our eye, not blessed us.” Yes, we all have been blind at times to the blessings of revelation that will have eternal consequences, and given up to grumblings instead about our current comfort and ease — not knowing our recognizing what opportunity lies waiting for the hand of God, for the healing power of Jesus, to turn even our current challenge to good.
Trusting in the Lord can see every wall fall, every door torn open, every mountain cast into the sea, and every blessing revealed. Do you want to begin to see how deep the blessings flow in ther Kingdom of God? Do you want to try counting your treasures and find that they all come from the only treasure worth having and keeping?
Do you know that Jesus loves you, and that there is a plan and purpose that you can trust in, because He isn’t seeking to harm you or destroy you but to lift you up to new heights?
“Fall, fall on your knees,
O hear the angel’s voices”
Look to that blessed night, when Christ was born, when God on high took on the lowly flesh of man, to live a sinless life of a persecuted, suffering servant, to die a criminals death so that you can be freed from the bondage of blindness to only what your eyes of flesh could see before — to the glory of ther blessings and mercy of God.
Harold J. Ballinger 