Last weekend destructive tornadoes hit the Dallas Texas area. A friend of mine that lives in Dallas, but was in an area not hit by the tornadoes , said a fellow ward member posted about how blessed they were to be spared the destruction. This bothered my friend, as the posts implied that those that did get hit by the tornadoes were NOT blessed, that somehow God was NOT watching out for them, and had abandon them. My friend said it would have been much more appropriate for the ward members to use the word “Grateful”.
So the ward members could have said “How grateful we are that the tornadoes did not hit out house”
What do you think of this idea? How would testimony meeting be if we followed this idea?
“I’m so grateful that my wife was cured of cancer”
“I’m so grateful that the fire department put out the brush fire before it got to my house”
“We are so grateful for the rain that has fallen”
What would then be the appropriate time to use the word “blessed’?
“We are so blessed to have a temple nearby”
“Our family was blessed while my husband served as bishop”
“Our stake was blessed to have Pres Nelson come for stake conference”
But even these could also imply that somebody else was not blessed. Maybe there was a family that fell apart (divorce) because the husband was bishop (I know of one). Maybe the Lord forgot to bless them?
What do you think? Is there a legitimate use of the word “blessed”, that won’t put somebody else down when they are not blessed?
What do you think of using grateful or thankful instead of blessed?
Wheat & Tares 
If I hear someone make a heartfelt yet simple expression of gratitude to God, I hope I will say “amen.”
Gratitude mixed with humility is better than the sense of entitlement that often accompanies self-proclamations of blessedness.
I agree “blessed” is a loaded word for the very issues you mentioned. However, I think it is fair to say that we don’t all receive the same blessings, so yes, in the same situation one person may experience a better outcome as a blessing from God. (Though I would argue sometimes it’s semantics/perspective – you may find the person whose house was destroyed calling that experience a blessing down the road depending on how he/she views the situation and/or what other events transpire next.) Blessing or trial? I think it depends on your perspective. Ultimately, what you do with them is what matters.
My issue is when people correlate the receiving of that blessing with their own personal righteousness. In that case, there is now an unspoken assumption that those who didn’t receive the same blessing were not as righteous. Considering that we are all unprofitable servants and that people everywhere regardless of actual actions or beliefs are receiving blessings, I find it arrogant to make claims of righteousness using blessings as proof.
In Sunstone magazine years ago, there was an article about unintended sermons. It discussed the concept that when we claim special protection from tornadoes that hit others, because of our obedience, we are implying that others were hit by that tornado because they were somehow less righteous. When we claim our missionary was protected from a near miss of a car accident, because they obeyed mission rules, we imply that the missionary who was killed in a car accident was not being as obedient.
This is the same old argument that Job’s unfriends threw at him. In all of the many thousand years we have had the book of Job, and we still don’t get it. The prosperity gospel is a lie. We are not blessed for righteousness.
Maybe we tend not to have the consequences of sin when we are righteous, and maybe when we are righteous we notice our many “blessings” more.. I really think there is something to the idea that when we are living our best, we tend to notice how lucky we are and we feel grateful. When we are living less righteously, we tend to take the good things in life for granted. But that is not based on being more blessed, but being more humble and more grateful.
This must be a subject that is “out there” right now, and I love that it is finally being addressed because some times in our own arrogance, we do not realize how it comes across. This was addressrd in a Huffpost article…you can google it, that us a great read. Our awareness of how the two can be used creates greater sensitivity to one another! Grateful for the post..thanks Bishop!
I feel like it’s OK to use “blessed” when we are talking about how other people have enriched our lives. For example, “She blessed me with help when my family was going through a rough time.” Saying with certainty that we were “blessed” by God in situations when we don’t actually know for sure what part God played in it ends up excluding or hurting people who may not have had such a positive outcome. I’ve seen so many people hurt recently by testimonies about so-called blessings that don’t apply to everyone. Lately I try to only talk about “blessings” from God when they are universal blessings. Jesus taught that God makes the rain fall and the sun rise on everyone.
Autumn, go feedback on the universal blessings. We in Southern California are blessed with good weather, and cursed (Satan?) with fires!
I don’t believe that God is upstairs stirring the pot . . . period. So I don’t believe that anyone is blessed, except for children soon after they are born.
I learned a lesson about publicly being “grateful” (aka bragging?) when my twin boys were born. Back in the day, fathers were excluded from the delivery room. I had stepped away from the waiting room. When I heard we had 2 healthy boys, I went bounding back to the waiting room. I crossed paths with a guy I had been waiting with. His baby had died and his wife had almost died. And here I had healthy twin boys. Not a good time for expressing gratitude.
I can’t forget all the seemingly unnecessary suffering in the world—including children who are born only to die of malnutrition. So much in life seems pure luck. For that reason, it is hard for me to believe that a Heavenly Father intervenes in minute ways—like helping us find a material object—but then the abused or tortured child goes unnoticed.
I only say “blessed” to myself, meaning “lucky.”
Nothing I earned, nor deserve than the next person.
God seemingly protected(?) Joseph Smith (and others) until he didn’t.
We live in a war zone; there are casualties in this world. Our walk with our Heavenly Father and gratefulness in that walk must not be contingent upon temporal success in the form of things “going well.”
Should we return thanks when we see His hand in temporal gifts? Yes! Should praise His name in pain? Yes! Like Job and Daniel’s friends, can we say: “Though he slay me, yet will I serve him.” ?
I believe these words, but in the middle of tragedy, all one can do is admit we long for the new creation and cling to Him through our tears. Like our Savior, there may be times when we shout: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me.”
It’s times like those that we see darkly through the mirror. But He is still there.
Taken to its logical conclusion, it would prevent us from ever acknowledging blessings from God. Born with a good family? Cannot say blessed, because what about those without a good family. Have a job? You are not blessed because what about those there are those who are unemployed and you cannot claim God doesn’t love them. And on and on and on.
If a tornado hits and someone is spared, they are blessed. Just because God doesn’t raise everyone from the dead doesn’t mean Lazarus was not blessed. Feeling bitter because someone else received a blessing you didn’t only makes sense if there is, underlying that, a feeling of entitlement — you feel entitled to Divine intervention and are upset when it doesn’t happen (especially when it happens to someone else and not you). It is myopic and very counterproductive.
Look, instead, to the Book of Mormon for a better example. The believers in the city of Ammonihah had their wives and children burned to death (while they were many forced to flee from the only homes they had ever known). Alma and Amulek later rejoined them and told them of the death of their loved ones and of the miraculous intervention that freed the two prophets from prison. Should the believers of Ammonihah have been bitter? Should Alma and Amulek have hidden the truth to not offend those who did not receive such blessings?
C. S. Lewis was right — it is more important that Heaven exist than that we happen to be going there. Likewise, it is more important that blessings and miracles exist than that we happen to receive one in our lives. To write out miracles and blessings — even to redefine them as gratitude (which is an underappreciated virtue in its own right) is to lose the power of a blessing to those who are able to see (even if they, themselves, don’t get to experience the same blessing). What’s more, to deny it as a blessing is to fail to acknowledge God’s Hand in all things, and we know from the Doctrine and Covenants what that leads to.
It seems an attempt to be too clever by half and misses the point. We need more recognition of the Divine intervention in our lives, not less. We certainly are not suffering as a society from an overabundance of awareness of the miraculous going on around us.
Isn’t there a difference between a blessing and a reward? It seems wrong to think of God like a vending machine that we can plug a dollar into and get a candy bar.
I feel like I’m blessed when I follow what I think God wants me to be doing. The blessing isn’t necessary a reward, and sometimes doesn’t even feel like a blessing at the time. Cliche-but-true example: I was head over heels in love with a boy when I was young, but he broke up with me. That didn’t feel like a blessing at the time, but it does now when I look at my husband.
Or maybe it’s further clarity. I follow what I THINK God wants me to be doing, and then I get a stronger feeling one way or the other about whether it really is what I should be doing. (Yes, more than once I’ve looked heavenward and said, “Mormon? Really?” Not exactly Moroni’s Promise, but it is what it is.)
Or maybe it’s a moment of assurance. I’ve only had a few moments in my life where I was certain God exists. I don’t believe those moments were rewards for some good behavior on my part, but more like signposts—blessings.
I see them as gifts, not a quid pro quo. They don’t come because I did something right, just like times of pain and difficulty aren’t punishments because I did something wrong. After all, God isn’t the only player on the board. My choices affect you and your choices affect me in an enormous web of cause-and-effect. If you walk up and punch me in the face, that was you, not God. If a child dies for lack of medical care, that’s because we, not God, didn’t provide that child with medicine.
I guess for me that’s where faith comes in. God promises if we seek after Them, we’ll be blessed. I may not always see it happen or recognize it as a blessing, so I have to take leaps of faith in that promise.
One thing that all prior comments overlook is regional / racial dialects. In other words, rejecting “blessed” and trying to correct others from saying this could come across as subtly racist. Let me explain.
Among Black culture (particularly in the South), “blessings” are invoked frequently in conversation, even in greetings with strangers. For example, “feeling blessed” is not an uncommon response to “how are you?” asked of a stranger. As you walk out of a store, sometimes you might hear “have a blessed day!” Yes, many whites in the South also use “blessed” in their vocabularies, though it tends to be more limited (i.e., when acknowledging God’s hand, akin to the definitions in all of the comments above). Black culture has a pretty strong embrace of “blessings,” at least in spoken language.
Because the OP was describing the tornado in Texas, basically on the edge of the south, likely with some mixing between Black and white cultures (along with Hispanics), questioning the use of the word “blessed” in this context might be seen as a racist pretext for covering up Black speech in public. Yes, there is an interesting semantic discussion of “blessed” versus “grateful” and the implied quid-pro-quo nature of obedience to the gospel (or not) that could be see here. But, to some folks, all of this debate amounts to “reasons why Black people shouldn’t be speaking up in public unless they’re going to speak like white people.”
I’m not saying anyone was intentionally being racist or insensitive here, but I thought this would be fruitful context, and perhaps cause some to reconsider the motives for being prescriptive about language norms.
May I be grateful for feeling blessed? 🙂
Or, isn’t it a blessing to able to be grateful? 🙂