Recently I've been reading More than a Story by Dani Tietjen and Henry Graf. I started the book a while ago, and decided that I wanted to finish it. The writers each write a story and then discuss the deeper meaning behind the stories. In one of them, they talked a lot about pride and helping others. The chapter in question is Shiny Red Blessings.
What is pride? Well, it is a family group of lions, but in humans, it is where someone thinks of themselves more highly than they should. This can be in the form of choosing your way over God's or can also be found in different areas of our lives such as deciding not to forgive, choosing who you will help, and by thinking you're a cooler cat than you are. I think that in part, we as people are inherently prideful. We want to talk about ourselves and spend time making ourselves look good to others. We also tend to think that we're the ones who decide if someone deserves forgiveness and decide who and when we want to be a blessing to others.
Now that we've spent a little time talking about pride, let's spend some time looking into what it means to be a blessing to others. I've learned that being a blessing to others means a couple of things. The first thing that I've learned, is that it means helping anyone you can. You can't be picky when you decide who to help, because that means you're being prideful as it's YOU who decides. I've also learned that it means helping however you can and in a way that is actually beneficial. If you help someone in only the way that you want and not in the way that they want to be helped, chances are you're not actually being a blessing. The last thing I've learned is to be cheerful when you're blessing others. If you have a rotten attitude, it shows and no one wants that.
All of this said, I hope that we as a Christian community can learn more about blessing others in a helpful way!
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