The holiday season provides a special opportunity to not only count our blessings, but to give specific consideration to the nature and necessity of giving and receiving.

To my mind, one of the most important realizations on the theme is this: every blessing that God ever gave to you came through someone else to you.

Moreover, if a blessing started to come through you to someone else and you tried to hold it back and keep it for yourself, you may have experienced thinking you had it before it began to vanish. It soon would be gone because the blessing He gave to you was not for you.

If you were receiving a blessing directly from God, it was not to you, for you it was to you, through you, for someone else.

Unless you become a means by which God can give blessings to someone else, so that you don’t try to steal them on the way through and keep them for yourself, and until you become an open window of heaven for God’s giving into the world, you are not in position to receive the gifts that God would give to you through someone else.

I, for instance, cannot receive any blessing for myself direct from God. I know that if I am to receive anything from God it will come through someone else—my wife, my children, my extended family, my friends, someone, somewhere. And if I receive anything from God it is not for me; it is for me to give. If I do not let it flow and relinquish it and give it freely—day by day, every day—I’d stop receiving it just as surely as the sun rises and sets.

I cannot receive any blessing, any gift directly from God to me for me. I know better than to try, because it is impossible.

God gives me every blessing that comes into my life, but He always gives it through someone else. I have never received any blessing but by God, but He sends it by a messenger, always.

I am thankful for those messengers in my life, those messengers of blessing, peace, and sustenance. I know, too, that I must remain diligent for my opportunities to let the blessings I am called to give find their recipient, properly packaged and delivered on time.

Let this holiday season carry you to a deeper recognition of the true nature of giving and receiving, which is in fact the true nature of living. This is the reason for the season as they say, but it is also the reason why you and I came to earth.

Photo on Unsplash by Kira auf der Heide