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Kerstin Hack and Rosemarie Stresemann: The Power of Blessing. Receiving and giving power for life · Quadro No. 40

Photos: photocase.com - tseemann (1), martinbuber (6), lkpro (14), biloba (22), karinclaus (30)

Discovering Blessing

How to use this book

Week 1: What Blessing Is

1.1 What is Blessing?

1.2 What Blessing Looks Like

1.3 The First Blessing

1.4 God Blesses Abraham + Isaac

1.5 Effects of Blessing

1.6 What is a Curse?

1.7 The Choice of Blessings or Curses

Week 2: Blessing in Concrete Terms

2.1 What will be Blessed?

2.2 Blessing in Practical Terms

2.3 Jacob’s Fight for Blessing

2.4 Blessing for Generations

2.5 Blessing for Generations II

2.6 How do I Come into Blessing?

2.7 How do I Come into Blessing? II

Week 3: Blessing People

3.1 Blessing – Priestly Service

3.2 We Bless with God

3.3 Signs of Blessing

3.4 Blessing God

3.5 Be Careful with Words

3.6 The Power of Words

3.7 Good and Bad Thoughts

Week 4: Specific Blessings

4.1 My Land

4.2 Family, Marriage

4.3 Politics

4.4 Illness

4.5 Things

4.6 Enemies

4.7 Be a Blessing

What was Important to Me?

Discovering Blessing

On all of your paths, I wish you much goodfortune and blessing and also health and happiness.

■ For some time, we’ve been preoccupied with the search for the secret of blessing. This search was prompted by the lectures in the book The Grace Outpouring by Roy Godwin.

He is a leader of a Christian relaxation center Ffald-y-Brenin in Wales. The German subtitle of the book can also be translated as “Blessing others through prayer”. We read about powerful changes that were caused there by simple prayers of blessing. Not only in the lives of people but also in nature and the fruitfulness of animals. God’s loving attention and presence became tangible - often even for people who didn’t know Him previously.

In order to find the secret of effective blessing, we traveled there together and took part in the life and prayer times of the community there. We can say from our hearts that we were “blessed”. But what does that really mean?

Can the people whom we tell about this imagine what we are talking about? How do we, ourselves, understand blessing?

Since I (Rosemarie) was a child, I’ve somehow connected the word “blessing” with consolation and loving attention. If something hurt me - if I’d scratched my knee or had some other accident in my childhood - my mother would stroke me on the head and say, “Heal, heal blessing, three days rain, three days sunshine and everything will be ok again.” Is the blessing of God something like a magical childhood incantation?

Even though we use the word “blessing” in many situations, we are often missing a deeper understanding about what blessing is and what it means to bless or to live blessed. Appropriate to the saying “Hard work pays off” (literal: stirring brings blessing), we began a journey to explore this theme. It led us, among other things, through many parts of the Bible.

Even those who did not grow up with Christian beliefs are often confronted with the theme of blessing in everyday life. There are wishes of blessing that have become so common in language that we don’t even notice them. For example, when someone sneezes and another says “Bless you.” If we narrowly miss something bad, we say “Thank God!” without thinking. In South Germany, people say “Ade” which comes from the French “à Dieu” and means “God bid” or “to God.” In Spanish, a common goodbye might include “Adios” (to God) or “Vaya con Dios” (Go with God).

Christians often wish each other “God bless you”. Is that simply a nice wish? After all, many people in this world daily wish someone else something good. This starts with “Good morning”. When someone is ill, others wish him “Get well soon”; if someone sneezes, he might be wished good health “Gesundheit,” etc. All of these things are blessings - and much more.

God’s blessing is more than just a nice wish. Blessing means much more than to pronounce something good to someone. In order to discover the fullness of what blessing includes, we began a search to discover the secret of a blessed life in the Bible and history.

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Discovering Blessing