I come back over and over to Abraham's and Sarah's journey, God's saying, "Leave the familiar and go the place I will show you." Along the way God speaks again: "I will bless you so that you will be a blessing."
This sketches for me the arc of a meaningful life. Setting out with vision. Losing the way. Achingly lost. Finding the way again. Being (and feeling) blessed. Losing the way again. Realizing that it's impossible to be blessed without becoming, ourselves, a blessing.
Rachel Naomi Remen is a sage for me. Perhaps she is for anybody who starts being more curious about how to be a blessing. Here's just one of a rich supply of examples from her writing:
As a counselor to people with cancer, I used to be ashamed of not being able to provide a more cognitive framework for what I do or offer a theoretical rationale for why I say what I say. I no longer feel this way. I also used to believe that things that could be expressed in numbers were truer than things that could only be said in words. I no longer believe that either. It has been my experience that presence is a more powerful catalyst for change than analysis and that we can know beyond doubt things we can never understand. --Rachel Remen
