The Paradox of Blessing

Had I been born at in a different decade, in a different family, or in a different part of the world, I would have led a vastly different life. I may have walked the world deformed and misshapen, twisted and hunched over from the effects of scoliosis. I may have avoided the years of wearing a back brace, struggling through junior high encased in plastic.

In 6th Grade, all of the students at Santa Venetia Middle School were checked for scoliosis. One by one we went into the nurse’s office and bent over to touch our toes while the nurse ran her fingers along our spine to make sure it was straight. It was important to catch any curve in the spine before we started growing, before it would get much worse and leave us twisted or hunched over. My mom was the one who noticed the curves in my spine, two of them, an ess-curve across my back. I don’t remember much after that. A series of doctors, consultations in a rehabilitation clinic, being wrapped in plaster of paris, and coming home one day wrapped in a brace of hard white plastic that covered my entire torso. Twenty-three and a ½ hours a day I would wear this brace for the next four years… during softball and orchestra, history and math, school dances and birthday parties waking up suddenly, during my junior year in high school as a young woman.

I am grateful to have been born in the time and place I was. Had I been born earlier, even a few years earlier, my experience would have been very different. Remember Joan Cusack in Sixteen Candles? That could have been me, wrapped in a metal frame with bars extending up under my neck, cello and all. Or I could have been left with a significant deformity or with metal rods fused to my spine. Instead, I was able to partially hide my brace under baggy shirts and had enough mobility to play 2nd base on my softball team.

I also recognize that I was incredibly blessed to have been born into a family that could afford good medical help and that had access to the latest medical technology.

Blessed. Is that the right word? It is not the type of blessing that comes as some sort of reward. It wasn’t deserved. It wasn’t asked for. It just was. In fact, some of the blessing of having been born into an upper middle class family in the United States has come at the cost of others who have not been as blessed in this way. I do not believe that material wealth or the provision of such medical advances means that God was any more present with me than God was with a Mayan woman in the mountains of Guatemala who never had such benefits.

Just as I don’t believe that the young girls and boys born a few years after me were favored more by God because they didn’t have to wear a brace at all. By the time I was out of my brace in high school an electrode therapy was developed to strengthen the muscles in your back while you are sleeping. No brace. No surgery. And no curves.

Blessing. I am grateful. I was incredibly blessed. It could have been so much worse. Yet there are those who are just as, if not more deserving, young girls and boys born today who will not even have the small blessing I had. I am amazed at how often, unintentionally, I tie material blessing to worth. How I judge the love of God by what I have or don’t have. I can’t help it. It is so embedded in our culture. I am confronted with it in subtle ways almost every day through advertising, the media, and our own pop-Christian culture. Yet it is so far from the truth. And it is in the paradox of blessings that at times I can shake myself free from these assumption and look beyond them to the real meaning of Christ’s love for us.