When bad things happen to us, we are quick to ask: "Why me?" We often fail to see God's providence in our bad luck: sometimes what we see as a "bad thing" might in fact be preempting an even worse thing that may have happened otherwise. Getting pulled over for a speeding ticket, for instance, may have prevented a fatal accident further down the road. This should not be taken to extremes, however. Sometimes tragedy strikes us and it is, quite simply, tragedy. No use saying, "Well, it could have been worse." At those moments when we ask, "Why me?" perhaps we ought to remember that Christ stands with us. Not to compare miseries with Christ, or to feel guilty about being upset, but to remember that Christ too asked, "Why me?" in the face of his death sentence. He knows what it is to feel those things. At those moments we have the honor to stand with Christ in Gethsamane, that garden made holy by Christ's blood and tears.
But when good things happen, we should be equally quick to ask: "Why me?" How will this good fortune help you to serve others better? How will it help draw you closer to God? I mean this in no simple "pay it forward" sense. I mean a willingness to accept the challenge and the risk attached to every blessing we receive. Esther's good fortune turns into something that seems like a curse: Mordecai tells her to use her high position to risk death for her people's sake. In Scripture blessings are always tinged with curses. Cain receives the blessing of God's protection, but is forever marked as a sinner. Jacob receives his father's blessing, but is driven from his homeland. Moses leads the people to the Promised Land but cannot enter with them. Then: Esther, blessed with beauty, rank, and wealth, now being challenged to use her blessings in self-sacrifice.
It is of course an irony. Esther is in a position to use her rank to save her people, but in using her rank she risks losing it. To save one's life one must lay it down. To receive, one must give. The blessing of God is a fearful thing. It is always hemmed with uncertainty. We must approach it with awful hope. We must accept the curse of uncertainty if we are to accept the blessing also. Nor can we hold onto the blessing rigidly. We cannot hide it in the dirt, hoping to preserve it. (How silly to interpret that parable as meaning such a trivial thing as one's "talents" and abilities! As if in our day and age people need more encouragement towards individualistic exhibitionism and self-promotion! Let your light shine, indeed!) We must be willing to risk our blessing, risk our inheritance, give away what we have been given. Such risk requires tremendous faith. It means taking your most prized possession - the thing you love most in the world - and giving it away without certainty that you will receive it back. It means being Abraham, ready to sacrifice Isaac, hoping against hope that "God will provide" an alternate sacrifice. The blessing of God means wrestling with those terrifying fears, that anguish, that despair.
How easy to rationalize away such a decision. "Why would God give me such a blessing," one would be tempted to ask, "if He only wanted me to risk its destruction? How is that being a good steward of God's gifts?" But remember such words are the words of the devil. The man who hid the coin thought he was being a good steward as well. The blessing of God comes with the demand that we be willing to give it up when called. We cannot receive the blessing without that willingness.
To say, "I have been blessed" means to stand with Noah and Job on the other side of their trials even while we are in the midst of our own. The blessing of God hounds us as it hounded Jonah was - hounded into the belly of the whale, hounded despite our own prejudices and narrow-mindedness and small-sightedness. Often we will find ourselves resenting God's blessing when we see the apparent curse attached. Often the curse will be much more real than the blessing. "Why me?" we will ask. "Why did God choose me?"
To be a person whom God blesses take much courage and much strength. It may even take a certain desperation - a certain recklessness. It is no job for the cautious and timid-hearted.
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Psalm 40 says: "Sacrifice and offering you do not want; you opened my ears. Holocaust and sin-offering you do not request; so I said, 'See, I come with an inscribed scroll written upon me. I delight to do your will, my God; your law is in my inner being!'" Or, more poetically: "You do not ask for sacrifice and offerings, but an open ear. You do not ask for holocaust and victim. Instead here am I." God wants us to open our ears to Him so that He can pour His Word - which is His life - into them. Thus His word will be "inscribed upon us"; His law will be "in our inner being." Then we stand before Him - "Here am I" - and offer Him back to Himself. He fills us with Himself; we offer the Him that He has filled us with back to Him. We must ready to be filled with Him so that we can give Him back to Himself - for He Himself is the perfect sacrifice, the perfect offering. The offering must not be something outside of ourselves, something external to ourselves. It must come from the depths of our very being. In fact it must be our being.
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