Blessings & Curses part 5: Redemption

The theme for these posts actually comes from, oddly enough, the movie 'Ghost Rider'. Not the world's greatest movie - fun if you have low expectations - but a movie that struck me nevertheless....

The whole thing is, in some ways, someone looking for redemption - looking for some way to change his curse into blessing, or at least looking for a second chance to make things right.

All through the movie, the words from a Steve Bell "Listening In" CD where Steve & his dad talk about the middle eastern concepts of 'the blessing'. In the talk, Steve's dad says something to the effect of that you can 'change a curse into a blessing if you hold it with holy hands'....

...this is a principle that I see in the Bible & see in life & has been my meditation over the last number of weeks. Jesus has this way of turning water into wine, turning evil into good, darkness to light, death to resurrection, despair to hope, rags to robes, mourning to dancing.... & as people loved by God, blessed by our Father, we live in this continual state of where our world could be flip-flopped at any moment, where tragedy turns to comedy, where the barren womb gives birth to Isaac (laughter) & the fairy tale becomes reality....

... I have spent much of my life cursing who I am & who I am not. I have spent many years berating myself for being 'not enough'. I look at others & live in this constant comparison. I see their gifts, their blessings, & feel cursed because I am not them. Then I look at me & my quirky, weird, odd little life & heart & think of how limited I am in my being....

... but there is the shift in me over the years.... I have begun (& start again) to hold me & my opinion of myself with more 'holy hands'... instead of looking at all that I am not, I am starting to look again at who I am. I try to begin to recognize the grace, the beauty, the wonder & goodness of who I am & who I'm made to be...

It is funny in a depressing, self-destructive kind of way as to how much we limit ourselves by looking only at what we are not instead of looking at who we are. We are made in the image of the divine, we bear His mark, His likeness... & in this we carry the mark of greatness, or simply the mark of being chosen, being loved divinely & limitlessly.... but we live most of our days oblivious to the blinding beauty of who we are, blind to how lavishly we are loved....

.... but it is this subtle shift of moving from looking at what we are not (our curses) to looking at the gift of who we are (our blessings) that the transformation happens.... the divine works in our hearts to draw us to this place, to woo us into seeing ourselves through the eyes of love, but it only really brings change as we start to believe it, as we start to embrace the truth, receive the gift of grace & love....

I had intended this to be a much longer, hopefully more profound rant. But I have spent my day listening to stories of redemption - of lives rescued and of stories of redemption just waiting to unfold. My heart is full of how good God is & for the moment I exist in a trust of His ability & abundant grace to turn stories around & change things in our lives (often I don't trust this, so I'm enjoying this moment of 'faith')....

...it's just beautiful for me to dwell on this idea of how God transforms all that we once thought was our 'curse' & shows us how all of it was blessing all along - all the evil we've done or have had done to us somehow, eventually, gets turned into goodness....