If There Is Only One Blessing, I Would Ask for Strength
If there is only one blessing I may get, I know what I would ask for. Not success. Not wealth. Not protection from failure. I would ask for the blessing of strength: to be able to keep going positively in life, accepting His will.
It took me some time to arrive there. For much of life, the obvious requests seem like the right ones. More success. Fewer failures. More of the things we can own and point to.
But success, failures and possessions are overhyped. They are overhyped because they play with our emotions. Success lifts us for a while, then asks for more. Failure drops us, then stays longer than it should. Possessions promise security and deliver upkeep. Each one pulls us up or down, and none of them holds still long enough to build a life on.
Strength is different. It does not depend on what happens. It is what lets us keep moving whatever happens.
The destination is death. The journey is on. This is not a morbid thought. It is the one certainty we all share. Since the destination is fixed, the only thing left to decide is how the journey is lived. I would rather enjoy it. Live it fully.
For me, living fully has a particular shape. Keep going. Do a lot of volume. Play hard, and with strength.
Volume matters because very little of value comes from a handful of attempts. What shapes us is repetition: showing up when the result is uncertain, and again when it disappoints. Playing hard means not holding back effort to protect ourselves from the possibility of losing.
Solving bigger and more complex problems. Not because difficulty is a virtue, but because bigger problems ask more of us, and we only find out what we have by being asked.
Learning and improving from cycles of success and failure. Neither one is final. Success shows what worked. Failure shows what we assumed. Both are teachers, if we are paying attention, and both are passing.
Enjoying the rewards, money and recognition, but staying humble. There is no need to pretend rewards do not matter. They do. But the moment they become the point, they start playing with our emotions again, and we are back where we began.
Busy playing and learning. That is the whole of it, really.
At first, accepting His will seems to sit oddly beside playing hard. Acceptance sounds passive. Effort sounds like control. But they belong together. Acceptance is about outcomes. Effort is about how we show up. We play fully, and we hold the result loosely. The strength I would ask for is exactly this: to keep going positively when the results do not arrive the way we wanted them to.
One day I go. When that day comes, I want to feel satisfied that I have lived and played fully. Not that I won every game. Not that I collected the most. Only that I played.
If you could ask for only one blessing, would it be for something that happens to you, or for something that holds when nothing does?
