Eight Steps to Emotional, Relational, Spiritual Wholeness: The Healing Power of the Beatitudes

This is the beginning of the intro to our book:

Blessed – to be envied, - wealthy – fortunate – happy. Yes! This is what we seek in our life. But after 40 years of preaching about the most famous “Blessed” passage in the Bible, the Beatitudes, I feel strongly that what the Lord says leads to “blessings” and what the World means by “blessings” are almost diametrically opposed.

Cultural Sidebar

Janie came walking across my dusty, empty backyard. Dusty and empty was how

my heart felt as it stopped when I saw her, because in her hand was a beautiful carved wooden bowl. It was made of a multi-colored wood that shone like polished stone and smelled like fresh wood shavings. We were leaving Zambia, Africa, soon, and my heart stopped because I knew she was bringing me this bowl as a farewell present.

Now Janie had 9 children, all whimsically named after a letter of the alphabet: Angel, Beatrice, Cyril, Derrick, down to Ignatius. The price of that bowl may have provided a pair of shoes for one of her children. And without shoes, one can’t go to school in Zambia. In fact, we would often see children laboring through the squishy, dark mud barefoot, carrying their shoes on their head so they would not get them dirty before they entered the classroom with them on. This present might mean one of her children would not go to school this year.

You can’t refuse a gift in Zambia, no matter how you might long to. If you made the least refusal, it would mean that you did not consider the gift worthy of you. At times you knew you were eating the last piece of meat that the family would see for a week or even much, much longer, but it was lovingly and carefully prepared specifically for you when you visited, and you MUST accept it. Such was the gift that was coming to me in Janie’s hands across my back yard.

But it was so so much more than that. Janie stated that this bowl was a gift not for me, but for my mother! Mom was sick in the States. It was one of the reasons we were going home. Janie knew about our concerns. Janie, however, had never met my mom, and never would. There would be no reciprocity in this gift. It was simply a gift given because Janie cared. It still brings tears to my eyes, more than 30 years later. Blessed.

If you have lived cross-culturally, you know that there are times that one is greatly humbled by the Christian expressions of brother and sisters in other countries. Janie looked at this gift as a way to express her spiritual care and concern for us and ours as we left. It was the outgrowth of her love of Jesus. It is a direct result of the scriptural injunction to give…and then give more, and then give more.