Chapter 11 

A Beginner's Manual of Self-Blessing

Where do you start? It really doesn't matter where you start-just start somewhere. It is a lot like an auction. The bids can start anywhere with the smallest amount you are willing to invest.

Maybe the most obvious place to start is by looking at yourself and thinking of the things about which you complain the most. Why not start with your aches and pains?

Agnes Sanford, an Episcopalian minister's wife, has written a fascinating book titled Healing Light. She tells of a visit to a sick friend. She entered the hospital room with a cheery "good morning." Then she added, "How are you?"

"Terrible, my legs are killing me," the friend replied.

"Have you ever tried blessing your legs, talking nice to them?" Mrs. Sanford suggested.

"For heaven's sake, why should I?" the friend asked. "These legs are killing me. I am scheduled for an operation for varicose veins. Besides all the expense of surgery, there will be a long time of recovery. If it weren't for these miserable legs I wouldn't be in the hospital at all."

"How long have you had these legs?" inquired Mrs. Sanford.

"That is a silly question. I have had them all my life," her friend replied.

"And how long is that?" Mrs. Sanford asked.

The friend admitted, "Just between us girls, forty years."

"Do you mean that you have had these same legs for forty years and all this time they have worked for you without so much as a `thank you'?" Mrs. Sanford replied.

"No, I guess not," said her friend.

"Well," continued Mrs. Sanford, "think about it for a few minutes. When you were born, you were born with two legs. One day as a tiny baby you looked down and discovered your tiny pink toes. You may even have been able to reach them. That must have been a good feeling."

"It must have been," the friend commented.

"Why don't you tell your legs `thank you' for this?" suggested Mrs. Sanford.

"Now?" came the reply.

"Why not?" Mrs. Sanford asked. "You have waited forty years."

"Thank you, legs," said the friend gratefully.

"Wonderful," interjected Mrs. Sanford. "Now think about all the other times your legs have been your friends. Remember how you learned to crawl, how much fun it was to get into the cupboards and pull out the pots and pans? Whose legs did you use to crawl across the kitchen floor?"

"Mine, of course," her friend replied.

"Tell them `thank you,' " Mrs. Sanford suggested.

"Thank you, legs," Mrs. Sanford's friend said, reluctantly. "I'm sorry I'm so late in telling you this."

"You are doing great for a lady who is out of practice," Mrs. Sanford pointed out, "but don't stop now. Think of learning to walk, to ride a tricycle and then a bicycle. Think of jumping rope and walking in the snow. Think of running to the mailbox to get a letter from your sweetheart. Your two legs carried you to all those places."

Mrs. Sanford continued, "As you lie here in your hospital bed, why not think of all the happy times in your life? Instead of dreading the surgery for which you are scheduled, spend the time blessing your legs for the many years they have worked for you. Remember the details of those experiences. Think of the music that accompanied you as you walked down the aisle of the wedding chapel. If you never walked again, you should be thankful for the forty years your legs have carried you."

After a prayer Mrs. Sanford left the room.

A few days later she returned to the hospital room to find n excited and jubilant woman.

"I can't wait to tell you what happened!" her friend exclaimed.

"Please tell me," Mrs. Sanford said.

"After you left my room the other day," the friend went on, "I thought to myself, That is the strangest advice I have ever heard. But what can it hurt to try the things Mrs. Sanford suggested? So I began remembering all the happy times of my life. My two legs had carried me into them.

After a while when I was sure no one could hear me, I began to speak my thanks out loud. `Thank you, legs,' I said self-consciously.

"One day something happened. I felt a warm glow on my legs. It felt as though they were reflecting light. Then the glow faded. My legs were suddenly healed. I do not need surgery."

As I read this story from Mrs. Sanford's book, I was impressed-and I was troubled. In the years that have passed since that time, I have had countless experiences that have assured me that blessing works this way. Not always is there the physical sensation, but blessing works.

How I Learned to Bless My Pain

There is strange wisdom in the world of blessing. You bless things not because they deserve a blessing, but because they need a blessing. That doesn't apply altogether in the case of blessing God, because he both deserves and needs our blessing. He is worthy of our praise as well. For the rest of us, and for many things that we encounter, blessing is conferred because it is needed.

Here is my story.

The congregation I pastored in Daytona Beach, Florida, needed a new building but there were no funds available. So we started construction with big dreams and a willingness to work. Men and women, boys and girls worked with their hands to "anchor their dreams to earth with deeds." For a year these wonderful people spent Monday and Thursday nights and all day Saturday working with whatever skill they had to construct the giant new auditorium.

My only talent was availability. I ended up on the unskilled labor detail. One of my first jobs was to help tear down an old building in which the church kitchen was located.

On one of the work nights, Earl Welborn and I were carrying a refrigerator out of the kitchen. The concrete floor had been broken up with a jack hammer. Walking was hazardous.

I stepped into a hole. That was the wrong thing to do. Immediately the pain in my back told me how very, very wrong it was. Thoughtfully-and rather quickly-I dropped the refrigerator.

I could not straighten up. Pain, agonizing pain, shot through my body. There was no way I could keep this pain a secret. A small crowd gathered.

"We had better pray for the pastor," someone suggested. "He's hurt."

Such a suggestion was not uncommon in those days. Apart from our natural concern for injured people there was an even more practical reason for prayer. We needed all the help we could get.

After the group prayed for me they asked, "How do you feel? Better?"

That was true. I did feel good because I was surrounded by caring, praying people. I felt better because they had put my case in the hands of the Great Physician. I felt better. My back did not. It hurt just as much as it had before. I couldn't straighten up.

To have pretended I was healed would not have been difficult if my illness had been a headache. I could have smiled long enough to go find an aspirin. With the back problem, there was no pretence possible.

What could I do? I began to walk around blessing God. I thought of the words of Isaiah 53. 1 realized that Christ had personally experienced my pain, just as he had carried my sin. In fact, when Jesus was healing people during his earthly ministry, Matthew reflected on these words: "[Jesus] himself took our infirmities, and bare our sicknesses" (Matt. 8:17). I blessed the Lord because he had voluntarily carried the sins and sickness of all the people of all time. He did this not for his benefit. It was for ours.

Then I blessed the pain itself. Strange as it seems, I thanked God for the pain. Without it I would never have understood how Jesus felt. Of course, my pain was trivial compared with his, but my pain let me know more than I would have known had I simply read the word pain. As a typical Christian I could sing the songs and hear the words that talked about the cross on which Christ was crucified. But pain was still just a word. Now it became a fact.

For fifteen minutes or so I walked around like a willow bent over in a windstorm. I kept my mind tuned to blessing. At the end of fifteen minutes the pain left me. I was able to stand straight and resume work.

When I remember scores of friends who have spent months in traction in a hospital simply because they injured their backs by picking up small objects, I bless God all over again for my deliverance.

More important than this, I have been able to share this story with scores of people who have felt pain. Many of them have told me, "As I lay on a hospital bed in extreme pain, my first thought was to complain. Then 1 remembered your story. As soon as I began to bless the Lord because he carried my pain, the pain began to ease. As I kept on doing this, I felt a healing touch."

You Don't Have to Step in a Hole

You don't have to wait until you step in a hole to learn to bless. You can begin any time. Everything around you is a miracle. Bless it.

We may talk about your wonderful mind, but it is so complex and miraculous that we really ought to start with something else-anything, maybe even your heart, for example.

Every twenty-three seconds your heart pumps the thirteen pints of blood through your entire body. It is everywhere. You cannot stick the point of a pin in your skin without finding blood. Doctors tell us that there are sixty thousand miles of arteries, veins, venules and capillaries through which this blood must pass. Some of these are the size of your little finger and some are so tiny that they can allow only a single cell to pass. Sixty thousand miles-that is more than the distance around the world twice. A miracle within our body!

This kind of faithful service goes on twenty-four hours a day. Maybe it gets a little jumpy sometimes. It may even have a little pain. Bless it. It needs it.

What if you worked for an employer for forty years and you never received so much as a thank you? Would you complain? Would you quit?

Your heart hasn't. Bless it. Your heart has been blessing you all of your life. With every pounding of the pulse it is saying "bless you." Why not return the favor? Psychologists talk about a new way of controlling the functions of your body. It is called biofeedback. It is claimed that the mind can "talk to" every organ of the body and change its behavior. Apparently this system works.

Why don't you and I invent the term blessing-feedback.

Bless Your Skin

When a dermatologist friend asked me, "What is the largest organ of the body?" 1 responded, "Probably the liver."

"Wrong," he said. "It is the skin."

So I started thinking about the skin to see how much I knew about it and to see how 1 felt about it. I quickly discovered that, although I was covered with it, I didn't know much about it. I am certain that I must have talked about it, but I had never talked to it. I am not even sure that I had said anything nice about it to anyone else.

A trip down memory lane was painful. Acne and allergies, blackheads and blemishes, and (would you believe it) wrinkles and sags-these were the things that got my attention. I am sure I complained. What an ungrateful tenant I had been as I lived in this house of skin.

Skin is a miracle. It is an energy-efficient air conditioning system that does not pollute with either noise or contaminants. It is a sanitation system that never rattles the garbage cans. It is a silent army that protects that body from millions of invading germs. It is a medical corps healing the wounds inflicted by an abrasive world. It is not only rugged and resilient; it beautifully covers the thousands of miles of blood vessels and muscles of the body. Without it we would look like an anatomy chart in a biology classroom.

Thank God for skin - sags and all. Bless you, skin.

Bless Your Hair

When the phone in my office rang, I had no idea that I would be speaking to one of my closest friends. He lives a thousand miles from me. Because the call came during the "high rate" time of the day, I guessed that there must be something important on his mind.

"I've got good news," he began. "I have been listening to the cassette tapes of your blessing lectures and, do you know what-you are telling the truth about blessing and what it can do."

"That's good to know," I replied.

"Well," he continued, "I had a set of those tapes around the house and I got to thinking that I would like to hear your voice again, so I started listening to them. Would you believe that I learned something about myself-something I never would have guessed? I always thought that I was a positive-thinking person, but I discovered that I have been cursing my hair."

"Really?" I asked somewhat incredulously.

My friend went on. "Oh, I don't curse it by using bad words, you understand. I just talked mean to my hair."

"That's bad," I said. "If you talk mean to your wife she won't stay around; she'll leave you. It could happen to your hair."

"It did," he said. "One morning as I combed my hair I noticed that a lot of it had been falling out. I kept combing what was left. Then I discovered that I was talking to myself-and of course my hair is part of myself: `I can't do a thing with this hair-why is it falling out?' "

Then my friend continued: "Suddenly I realized that I had formed some bad habits over the years. I complained about my hair, its texture, its manageability, and its changing color. Never once had I complimented it or said kind things to it. That is terrible. No wonder my hair was leaving me strand by strand. So I started blessing it, saying nice things to it."

"What happened?" I asked.

"My hair has started coming back again," he said, "and it is coming in curly."

What could I say? What did I need to say? Just, "Bless you, my friend. Keep it up."

When I finished this telephone conversation I leaned back in my chair and thought, "It sounds trivial to waste time talking about falling hair. Or is it? The Bible talks about the hairs of our head.

Strange as it seems, the Bible has something to say about our hair. For example, "The very hairs of your head are all numbered" (Matt. 10:30) and "There shall not an hair of your head perish" (Luke 21:18).

Do these scriptures mean anything? Obviously they talk about the intimate knowledge of God. He knows everything about his children. And he is concerned about the most trivial of things.

According to specialists, the average blonde has 110,000 hairs on his or her head. The average brunette has 100,000. The average redhead has 90,000. These are averages.

The Bible says that God is more accurate. He knows the number of hairs of every person. When Paul assured his fellow travelers of their safety he said that not one hair of their heads would be lost. Jesus used the same expression to tell us of his protection.

When my wife, Berny, returns from the beauty shop she often says, "The operator told me that I have the easiest hair to work with he has ever seen. Sometimes the customers talk to me and say `what beautiful hair you have.' "

"What do you say to them?" I ask.

She replies, "I always say, `I have been blessed with good hair.' "

Then Berny will say to me, "I guess I have formed the habit of blessing my hair and not knowing that I was doing it. I have noticed however, that people who talk mean about their hair always have trouble with it."

If it seems trivial to start a spiritual pilgrimage with such a small thing as a strand of hair, remember the Chinese proverb "A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step." A tiny step that starts you on the highway of blessing is a very important thing. Start.

There are good economic reasons for blessing your hair. Recently a friend of mine who deplored his balding head had a hair transplant. Apart from the discomfort involved there was a significant cost. His new "crowning glory" cost more than a month's wages. A hundred thousand hairs that do not need to be replaced have a market value of fifty thousand dollars. Bless them. If for no other reason, bless them simply because they have stayed with you. Who knows what would have happened if you had sincerely blessed them before they were gone.

If, as the Bible says, God has an accurate count of the hairs of your head, he knows how many thank you's are due - probably overdue. A hundred thousand thank you's would certainly get you in practice.

"Let Everything That Has Breath...."

You are breathing. Do you know what is happening?

Naturally, when you breathe your lungs fill with air. The oxygen gets into your blood stream and your entire body is nourished. Four or five minutes without oxygen will permanently damage your brain.

The fact that you are reading these words and understanding them means that your brain has been nourished by oxygen since your birth. Your lungs have been faithful. Have you blessed them?

Perhaps it will help to visualize them, to picture them, so that you will understand how miraculous they are.

Your lungs are not just two balloon-like organs inside your body. They are delicately built with countless air sacs and sensitive membranes. If you could stretch these surfaces out to form one continuous surface, there would be seventy-five square yards of surface. Seventy-five square yards. That is tremendous. Seventy-five square yards of carpet would carpet three rooms fifteen feet wide by fifteen feet long. Think of it. What a miracle. What a blessing. Your lungs have blessed you. Why not bless them? Learn to breathe deep and with each breath bless the Lord.

No wonder the psalmist said, "Let everything that hath breath praise the Lord."

Bless Your Kidneys

What happens when your kidneys stop? You do, too. Your body can sustain many losses without being seriously impaired, but when your kidneys stop working death follows. How blessed you are if they work.

Not long ago I visited a family whose mother had a kidney malfunction; she had to be taken regularly to the university hospital to be put on the dialysis machine. Without this she would have died. Not only were these trips to the hospital time consuming and inconvenient, but the actual cost to the family was $6,500 dollars a year.

If your kidneys are working normally you have good cause to rejoice. You save not only many hours a week, but also at least $6,500 each year for doing what you cannot help doing.

Everything within me is a miracle. "[Let] all that is within me, bless his holy name" (Ps. 103:1).

Bless My Mind

The mind is a miracle. It starts working the moment you are born and never stops for a single moment, night or day, until you stand to make a speech in public.

The mind is a miracle indeed. Even when our mind is paralyzed with fear it reveals its complexity. Compared to the human mind the most sophisticated computer of today's scientific world is about as complicated as a clothespin. Scientists, trying to discover the limits of the human mind, conclude breathlessly, "It's infinite. It has no limits."

How often do you bless your mind? Why is it more normal for us to forget all the things our minds do for us while complaining about the few times it takes a coffee break.

Personally I have been blessed with a wonderful memory. When I am asked about the secret of my memory I simply say that I speak kindly to my mind. If in the middle of an important address I forget an illustration or a set of statistics, I don't panic. I simply smile and say to my mind, "Bless you, mind, you have worked so hard and done so well that you deserve a vacation. Come back to work when you feel better."

Not surprisingly, my mind treats me very well. If I am trying to recall a face or a name and nothing seems to surface I simply say to my mind, "Bless you, mind. You have this information stored somewhere and when you find time would you send it up to me? You have been a wonderful friend for all these years and I don't want to impose on you." My mind appreciates that, and very soon the name comes to my lips.

Even as I write these words my mind is spilling out the information and insights it has gathered in many lands and many times. What an incredible blessing it is.

If I were locked in a dungeon my mind would be the silver ship that transported me again to all the exotic places I have visited in my entire life. If I were never to read another word my mind would pull book after book from the library of my memory. If I never saw another face as long as I lived, my mind would fill my days with smiling faces out of the past.

Should it be difficult to bless a friend like this?

Chapter 12

Living the Blessing Life

Living the blessing life is not simply recognizing the physical or intellectual miracles housed in your personality; you must accept and bless the entire self. If you do not believe that God made and loves you, how will you convince others that God loves them? If you cannot bless yourself, how can you bless them?

A few years ago I met an old college classmate of mine. Since our school days he has gone on to get a doctoral degree in clinical psychology. He is presently employed in a hospital where he works with emotionally disturbed people. I knew this man, George Cerbus, was the person I wanted to talk to.

"George," I said, "is it true that self-dislike is one of the most expensive emotions we can have?"

"Certainly," George said," When people are not happy with who they are they will create a world for themselves in which they feel comfortable. Since this is not a real world, but a world of fantasy, they become psychotic or sick. To get them back to the real world is terribly difficult because they didn't like it in the first place."

Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested a key for happy living. He called it self-reliance. This is not exactly the same thing as blessing yourself, but it is one rung on the ladder.

"Trust thyself," he wrote, "every heart vibrates to that iron string. . . . There comes a time in every man's education when he realizes that envy is ignorance and imitation is suicide. . . . We reject our own ideas precisely because they are our own. They come back to haunt us with a certain alienated majesty."

You are unique. There is no one like you. To strive to be anyone else is to destroy the person that you are. To accept yourself as a special gift from God is to take the first step to the life of blessing. It is not likely that you will joyfully share yourself with others if you cannot accept yourself for yourself. To deny that unique person that you are is to hurl disdain in the face of God.

Let me make up a story.

The time is four o'clock in the afternoon. Six-year-old Randy walks into the kitchen where his mother is busy preparing supper.

"Look what I made for you in school," says Randy, proudly displaying a brightly colored piece of paper. "What is it?" his mother asks.

"It's a picture," Randy replies. "I made it today especially for you. Here is the tree; here is a house. The sun is shining in the sky."

"Is that the sun?" Randy's mother inquires. "It looks like a spider hanging from the ceiling."

"Are you going to hang my picture on the wall, mother?" the boy asks, expectantly.

"Of course not," the mother replies. "It doesn't match a thing in the room. Besides, there are prettier pictures than yours on the covers of magazines."

"But mother, this is different," pleads the little boy. "I made it especially for you and I wrote your name on it. I even wrote `love from Randy' with a big red crayon."

"Well thank you, Randy," says the mother. "Just lay your picture up here on the counter and we will do something with it."

The busy mother continues to get supper ready. Suddenly she realizes that she has not emptied the coffee grounds from the percolator since breakfast. Hastily she dumps the coffee grounds onto the colored paper that her son Randy has given her and throws them in the garbage.

"But mother," sobs Randy, "I made this picture for you. I made it myself. I thought you would like it."

This is an imaginary story. I made it up totally. It is a sad story, but it is not true. Yet even as I write it I can feel the tears start in my eyes. Though I have written this story I really cannot imagine any mother acting as Randy's mother did. She would certainly have to have a bag of gravel for a heart.

Now, if we can become emotional about a piece of paper hastily covered with crayon marks by a six-year-old child, if we can lament the hardheartedness of a mother who scorns the creation of her child, what shall we say of our own self-rejection?

You are a creation of God. Whether you think of yourself as an accident of either your parents or mother nature, you are far from this. You were first conceived in the thoughts of the universe's greatest thinker. You are like no one else. You were designed individually, lovingly, and purposefully.

If, for whatever reasons of foolish comparison, you crumple your life like a piece of waste paper and hurl it in the world's rubbish heap, God must weep. If you curse yourself, how can you call that humility?

Sometimes in the confusion and disarray of new construction a building looks like a disaster area. But contractors who walk around the piles of rough timbers and disturbed earth keep blueprints in their hands. The growing pains do not trouble them. They bless each sign of progress because they know that a magnificent building will one day stand where today there is only confusion.

What a miracle you are. You are composed of countless atoms-millions of them could dance together on the head of a pin. Yet each of these tiny atoms remembers the gleam in its Creator's eye when he created it. It was made for a purpose-a glorious purpose.

There is no way to avoid the lesson. Bless yourself. You are not only made by God; you are loved by him.

Strange as it seems, our entire society appears to be bent on making us feel dissatisfied. People who are old are encouraged to think that youth is the only good time of life. Young people are led to believe that happiness can come only with mature years. Babies are hurried into the growing-up process and growing-up people are pressured into the slowing-up process. We are assured that it is better somewhere else.

If we are born in the country, we are led to believe that "it is too far from everything." If we are born in the city we are told that moving back to nature is the only way to live.

If we are forever dreaming of the person we ought to be or the place we cannot be, we never accept who we are and where we are. So we miss life.

It was a custom of Old Testament characters to erect a stone altar at various places and say, "Surely God is in this place." You are standing in a wonderful place for an altar. Why not build an altar of blessing for who you are and where you are?

God is blessing you. When you bless yourself, you think like God thinks. That's not a bad idea. Look what happens when God begins to think.

It's Hard to Splash Out of an Empty Cup

We smile indulgently as we hear of the foolish spectator who asked the builder how he started construction on a home. "Do you start at the top and work down or do you start at the bottom and build up?"

We all know that we start with foundations. If you have followed the blessing path to this point, you know that all great things come from God. The "Doxology" has become more than a tip-of-the-hat to religious tradition. "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" sounds more like a scientific statement.

God is the source. He is the blesser. When we respond to him in blessing his name, something happens to us. Regardless of how imperfect we may be, or how imperfect our world may be, we can find no fault with God. We bless him.

When we do this, something happens to us. We are free to accept ourselves and to bless ourselves because God has blessed us and accepts us.

At first it seems almost selfish to bless ourselves before we try to be a blessing to other people, but this is the only way it will work.

Having taken the first two steps, we are ready to take the most enjoyable step of all. We learn to bless other people and even inanimate objects.

Tillie Was a Remarkable Car

In Montana a charming enthusiastic woman came to the blessing lectures. One day she told me about her experience.

"I have really enjoyed learning about Psalm 103 and the life of blessing," she said. "Actually I must have known some of these things all the time because I discovered that if you talk kindly to things they work better. So I have talked to my car and to my flowers. But I wouldn't tell anyone about it.

"I used to bless my car," she continued. "The more I talked to it the better it ran. Although the odometer registered more than 200,000 miles, it kept running without trouble. Since I am not the fix-it type, I sort of let the outside deteriorate. It began to look terribly shabby, but it still ran like a charm. I really didn't know what to do. I still liked the car but was getting ashamed to drive it.

"Tillie had been such a good friend to me that I didn't have the heart to sell her to a junk dealer, or someone who might not love her. So I decided on a way to have `death with dignity.' I entered Tillie in a demolition derby. That way she could go out in a blaze of glory."

The story intrigued me. I could imagine that ancient Oldsmobile coughing her way to destruction. "What happened?" I asked.

She replied, "Would you believe that it lasted to the end of the race? When it finally came to a stop, the last car on the field, all the tires were still intact, the battery, hanging by a wire, was still working. The alternator was fastened by a single bolt, but it was still charging. If I were ever going to get rid of that car I would have to beat it to death with a stick. But how can you do that to a car you love?"

Blessing works-even on old cars.

This story brought back memories. When my own old automobile-to whom I always spoke kindly-registered 100,000 miles, my wife Berny and I had a little service of blessing for it. Even now when I add oil to the crankcase I tend to think of this as a kind of anointing.

Maybe cars are not your problem. People may be, but it really is exciting to learn to bless things, too. Let me tell you about one machine that almost ruined the morale of our office.

Barbara and the Ominous Cast-iron Hulk

As you read this book you will discover that I am involved in religious work. For many years I was pastor of a church and administrator of a school. Both of these are holy callings. Somehow I have the feeling that people in secular callings misunderstand the temptations that come to "men of the cloth," as we are sometimes called. Somehow I feel that outsiders think we spend most of our time in the chapel meditating and getting a celestial suntan from the light that shines through the stained-glass windows.

Not so. There are worlds of misprinting typewriters and crotchety duplicating machines that reach out to grab us with inky fingers as we are on our way to a society tea party. Then there are addressing machines. These are the complicated, necessary, capricious inventions of the regions of darkness. At least ours was-that is until Barbara came.

We had a wonderful staff of workers. The formula was simple. If you weren't wonderful you didn't stay. Though we didn't plan it that way, each new recruit in the office was assigned to the test-your-sanctification-on-the-addressing-machine department.

While I am about as mechanically inclined as a left-handed jelly fish, I was often called to fix the balking machine. I also had to calm the nerves of the frustrated operator.

"Do you talk kindly to the addressing machine?" I would ask.

Usually the answer was, "Well I didn't say anything bad, but I thought about it."

Then Barbara came. Barbara was assigned to the hulking gray machine.

"What does it do?" she asked innocently.

Trying not to act too critical, one of the senior secretaries said, "This machine puts addresses on envelopes automatically."

"Wonderful," said Barbara. "That seems so much more efficient than doing it by hand. I can hardly wait to learn to operate it."

Nobody smiled. They figured Barbara would learn quickly enough. They let her.

No complaints came from the addressing department. Work came out in profusion and deadlines were met. I was never called to make emergency repairs. Finally I could stand it no more. I had to pay a visit to the addressing department. Barbara was operating the machine and instead of its normal bad habits, the gray hulk was singing like a stage-struck canary. Was Barbara a better mechanic than I?

I asked Nita, my secretary, about it.

"Barbara has a way with the addressing machine," she said. "She really likes it."

I began to miss my frequent visits to the addressing room. I felt unwanted, unneeded, a little like a parent losing his or her last child. So, with no excuse whatsoever I ventured out to see the formidable gray machine. As many fingernails as it broke and as many foreheads as it furrowed, I could not forget it.

The gray monster was still there, but it looked strangely different. I can't say that it looked modern-it looked like a prissy old lady wearing a benign smile. As a matter of fact, Barbara had put some pink plastic petunias on the machine.

"Barbara, what is your secret for keeping this machine running so well. Are you a natural-born mechanic?"

"I talk kindly to it," she said.

"Barbara, have you ever heard about blessing things?" I asked.

"No," she replied, "but I have heard that you give lectures about it. I'd like to hear them sometimes."

"Later," I said. "I don't want to confuse you with a lot of new ideas. Your system of blessing works quite well now."

Chapter 13

Bless the Kawasakis and the Hondas

Our home in Florida was located on a busy street. Since it was a large older-type home, we could not afford to air condition it, and so during the summer we slept with the windows open. This arrangement let in not only the breeze but the sounds of screeching tires and roaring engines.

One night this noise irritated me greatly. I had retired early because I had to catch an early plane the next morning. The more I tried to go to sleep the more the noises bothered me. Finally I tried to pray about this irritation. Nothing happened.

Somehow God spoke to my turning and tossing mind. He said, "Berquist, why are you so worried about getting to sleep?"

"I have to get up early to take a plane," I replied. "I have to fly clear across the country tomorrow."

"What are you going to do clear across the country that is so important?" God asked.

Taking my excuse further, I said, "I am giving my lectures on blessing-the ones on Psalm 103."

Then God said, "Did it ever occur to you to practice what you preach?"

"Sometimes," I replied. "Why?"

God said, "Do you realize that you have been lying here `cursing' all the noises and the people who make them? Why don't you try blessing them?"

Since I was awake anyway, the idea didn't seem too bad. I tried to turn the stream of my thoughts from the negative to the positive, from cursing to blessing. I tried to imagine the thrill a teen-ager might have as he "varoomed" his Kawasaki under my window. "Bless you, son, and may God protect you tonight," I said softly.

As giant transport vans approached the stoplight, I tried to think of the loads of furniture they were carrying and the people for whom they were carrying them. People who are moving need my blessing. "Bless you," I said. "Driver, may you stay awake as you travel. May your cargo arrive safely with nothing broken but the monstrous vase that the people didn't know what to do with anyway."

The whole thing became a game. Just as I was getting to enjoy it, I fell into blessed sleep.

Jesus said, "Bless them that curse you."

A schoolteacher recently handed me an article from a newspaper whose name I didn't recognize. She asked me to read it and then to tell her what I thought of it.

I read it not once but twice. Both times there were tears in my eyes as I read the sensitive and caring words, words that had to have come from a loving person.

"Whoever wrote this must be a loving person," I said. She smiled. "He is our `blessing man.' " "You mean he goes around blessing people?" I asked. "Not quite," she replied. "He is a teacher I had to work

with, a volatile man who was so hostile that no one could approach him. Those who could, avoided him totally. I couldn't-I had to work with him. I had to see him several times a day."

"What did you do?" I asked.

"About this time," she said, "my husband and I were listening to the lectures on blessing and we decided to see if that principle would really work. We started saying, `bless you,' whenever we thought of him."

She continued, "Things began to change. Over a period of time he became the loving and caring person who could write what you have just read."

This is one of the laws of blessing. The less people deserve blessing the more they need it. People who bless non-deserving people receive the greatest blessing in return.

Someone once said, "Anger is a poison more hurtful to the cup that carried it than to the object on which it is poured." That is true-and sad.

It is also true that blessing sweetens the cup out of which it is poured at least as much as the objects on which it is poured.

Blessing and the Law of Increasing Returns

Looking back on the whole story of blessing, I find scores of illustrations. None is more powerful than the parallel wires. When the secondary wire gets in perfect alignment with the overhead wire, it becomes activated. Whether or not we understand the electronic principle, we can prove the principle at the human level any time we want to.

Just as God is merciful to those who don't deserve mercy (and that is the reason it is called mercy), we are asked to be merciful. Just as God blesses people according to their need and not according to their worthiness, we are asked to bless people. There is great reward for this obedience.

As soon as we start acting like God-not trying to be God-God's energy comes to us. As we start blessing other people, God's blessings come to us.

Charles Schwartz proved this. Charles is more commonly known as "Flop" to his friends in the small mountain town in Virginia. Saltville is my wife's home town, too. That is how I found Saltville.

I was invited to give my blessing lectures to the congregation in Saltville. As I described the Parallel Principle, Flop was an eager listener. One night he told me his story.

Flop was exposed to mercury as he worked in the chemical plant and became critically ill with mercury poisoning. For twenty-three days he lingered between life and death in the intensive care unit of Duke University Hospital. Doctors had exhausted every possible way of helping him. All he could do was to lie in pain and pray.

"One day as I lay on my bed praying," he said, "I felt terribly discouraged. Everything seemed hopeless. Finally I thought of a prayer I could pray. `Lord I don't know how to pray; will you teach me?' "

Suddenly Flop felt an inspiration to pray for the other patients in the intensive care unit. "If I could not get help for myself," he said, "at least I may do something for them."

Flop continued, "Though I had no idea what was wrong with these people and although there was no way to explain to them what I was doing, I started blessing them.

"Miraculously I began to recover. Within one day I was so improved that I was transferred to a conventional hospital room. In three or four days I was allowed to go home."

This is the positive reward for blessing others. Returning to the ideas that are discussed in detail in the first part of this book, we discover that everything attracts to itself things like itself. Lives that are tuned to giving blessings receive blessings.

As I write these words I am in a lonely motel room with a noisy air conditioner doing its best to keep me company. Near me lies the morning paper with its screaming headlines telling of trouble all over the world. The inside pages continue the story of divorce and separations. We all want our share-and we want it first.

What would happen if people would adopt the Flop Schwartz Initiative Technique? We could pray, "I don't understand why the blessings I need don't come to me, Lord. But in the meantime there are a lot of people who need a blessing. Bless them."

The chemistry of the world would change. If only one person did this, things would change. I have seen it happen.

The Worst Story I Ever Heard

Well-known pastor and evangelist Dr. Dale Oldham claims that a sermon is just an excuse to string stories together. This doesn't seem far from the truth when you remember that Jesus, master teacher of all time, used stories to illustrate eternal truth.

Ross Minkler, a minister friend of mine, is a man of stories. He told me the worst story I ever heard. I am tempted to tell you that it is not true, but I am not sure myself. I will simply tell it to you and let you decide.

"Once upon a time," says Ross Minkler, "there were two brothers. As it happened, the younger brother was always successful in whatever he tried to do. Apparently all the family good luck had come to him, because the older brother was always a failure. If the older brother bought a car it turned out to be a `lemon.' If the younger brother bought a car it turned out to be a classic, worth many times what he had paid for it. Stocks were the same way. The older brother's purchases always decreased in value and the younger brother's portfolio always skyrocketed. It was always that way.

"One day the older brother complained to God about the unfairness of it all. `Surely,' he said, 'surely there must be a time in my life when I will be able to get some good things.'

"As he prayed an angel entered the room, saying, 'Your prayers have been heard. You will get whatever you wish.'

'"Wonderful,' said the brother, 'but what is the catch to all this?'

" 'There are no "catches," as you call them,' said the angel. 'There is one condition. Whatever you get, your brother will receive twice as much. You will have one hour to consider what you want to ask for.'

" 'I don't need an hour,' the brother said. 'I don't need five minutes. I know what I want now-I want to have one of my eyes put out.' "

As Ross told me this story I asked myself, Can it be true?

At first I thought it was impossible. God would not allow anyone to imprison himself or herself in his or her own hostility and selfishness. But he does.

Then I thought of the stupidity of the human mind. Would anyone begrudge his or her fellow humans a blessing simply because he or she was covetous? But we do. When we withhold from others, we rob ourselves.

Your Blessing Potential

Imagine you are greeted by an angel tomorrow morning. His first words are, "Here is a one-hundred-dollar bill. There is only one condition to your accepting it. You must give it away by midnight."

Can you imagine what you would think? Who is worthy of such a gift? Who deserves it? So all day long you finger the bill. Mentally you list people to whom you might give the bill. Then you cross them off. They are not quite deserving. At last the day is almost over and you realize that you must give the one hundred dollars to someone whether that person deserves it or not. The day has been a long one filled with indecision.

Oh well, you decide, I had better give it to the first person I meet whether he or she deserves it or not. Grudgingly you hand the wrinkled currency to a stranger.

Reaching into your pocket to affirm its emptiness, you discover a miracle. There are two one-hundred-dollar bills in your pocket. Your giving has multiplied money. Perhaps it would be safe to risk one of these again. You do and the multiplication continues. For the one you gave you have two more. Soon you are stopping people on the street to bless them with your generosity. Why didn't I start sooner? you think. Blessing is like that. It works on the law of increasing returns.

Dan and Donna Archibald live in Montana where Dan farms a large tract of ranch land. All his life Dan has worked hard-maybe too hard. Last summer he heard the blessing lectures and decided to experiment on his own. He began to bless his farm, his neighbors' farms, and even his children.

Recently I visited Dan's farm and he pointed out his "blessing road." Along this mile of dirt road Dan has found a place to walk while he repeats Psalm 103 and blesses the lands all around him.

"Strange as it sounds," he told me, "rains didn't come to our state this year as they should have. But they did come to my farm and those bordering on mine. I blessed them, and I blessed God for them. How can you lose on a deal like that?"

Lowell Wilson, with whom I have shared many hours, ideas, and miles, once said to me, "I don't remember asking God for anything during recent years. I simply kneel and say to him again and again, `Bless the Lord, 0 My soul: and all that is within me, bless his holy name. Bless the Lord, 0 my soul, and forget not all his benefits.' " Perhaps this is the finest kind of prayer.

There is no end to the story I am telling you. If some of the stories 1 have told seem almost magic, let them seem so. You do not have to believe them. All you have to do is to realize that there are two powerful forces in the world: blessing and cursing. Decide to line up with the power of blessing and you will have stories enough for a book of your own. If you write it, I have a title: How I Became a New Person through the Power of Blessing.