Did Abram feel blessed? Did Sarai feel blessed, or did she just stoically do her duty without feeling anything but longing for a baby of her own?
Some people can go to church all their lives and never have a feeling of intense spiritual bliss. Other people seem to be having spiritual highs all the time, in fact you almost long for them to become ‘normal’ and complain about something.
Mrs. (I shall call her Webster.) was just such a lady, brought up in the faith, she confirmed her faith in her very early teens because she did believe, but she never felt anything. When in small groups she talked of her faith, she said she believed in Christ because her parents did. Mrs. Webster never had any feelings associated with believing in Christ, she never expected to. She and several others in that particular congregation were extremely suspicious of anyone who said they ‘felt’ blessed, or happy or liberated. Such talk was labeled as being ‘holier than thou’.
Until she came to sell up the home in which she had lived since she married, until the time when she was to move into a high-rise built for old people who could no longer live in their own homes.
”I think I should tell you, she said to me as she moved about the building doing some of the tasks that the Women’s Association did, “I have a feeling, a strong feeling, I feel as if someone is with me all the time I am packing up my home and getting ready to move, I feel someone always there comforting me and telling me it will be alright where I am going.”
God keeps faith, with people who believe because their parents did, with people who continue in the faith and never feel a thing. God had come to her when she was at her loneliest and most distressed and given her the feelings she had had a right to all along. How gentle our God is. Later Mrs. Webster told me that she still felt the presence. She looked 10 years younger, a combination of the security of the new home and the presence that accompanied her.
Did Abram always feel blessed? When people asked him how he was did he reply that he was guarded and protected by the only God and that he was blessed and called to be a blessing. I think he did, he was a leader as well as a strong believer. One of the meanings of the O.T. phrase, ‘Called upon the Lord’ is to preach. Young chooses this meaning in his literal translation.
As for me, I still find that safe and acceptable conversation can usually be made by stating what is going wrong rather than by witnessing about the blessings I constantly live among. I wonder if I should change?
