The lost roots of blessing

I am beginning to feel that "blessing," like "awesome," is a word that has lost its power.

It is not uncommon for me to hear people talking about "looking for ways to bless each other," or asserting that "so-and-so is such a blessing to me." While it is true that the word "bless" carries the meaning of any sort of bestowal of good, in the Scriptural context it is a word most frequently used by and of God. When I went to Bible Gateway and looked up the phrase "bless each other," I found a grand total of zero references. The word most commonly associated with "each other," by the way, seemed to be "love."

People have asked me how they can bless me, and I have never really known how to answer. It's like having someone ask you how to love you. You love someone or you don't. You bless someone or you don't. There is no middle ground. But blessing, like love, is a nicely nebulous concept today, and it is made more so by churchifying the word—ingraining the word so deeply into common church-goer parlance that it cannot be defined.

But then, we don't need dictionary definitions of these words. We know how to love people. We know how to bless people. We know by the means Jesus laid out in all their painful simplicity: "Treat others the same way you want them to treat you" (Luke 6:31).

We love because we are loved first. We bless because we have been blessed. We are not the source of love or the source of blessing, both of which originate with an awesome God. Neither can we rob true love, blessing, or awesomeness of their power, no matter how flippantly we use the words meant to signify them. Still, shouldn't the words carry a reflection of that power?

We are far removed from the Hebrew scribes, who had special rituals that accompanied the writing of the name of God. Is all of that removal to the good?