Blessings

I owe a lot to my friends Miles and Sarah, who now live in posh London. They used to live in Stanford in the Vale where I was vicar. Sarah has a lovely voice and used to lead worship for us. Every now and then she makes a comment on Facebook about a singer whom she's discovered. When I've found them on YouTube, she invariably proves a great talent spotter. One was Alison Krauss. Yesterday she posted, "Just discovered the amazingly beautiful voice and lyrics of Laura Story - loving Blessings." So I followed it up, and of course she's right! Blessings on YouTube

On her website, I found this account by Laura Story, which I reckoned was very helpful and rather good theology.

"The album that I did three to four years ago happened right after my husband went through surgery for a brain tumor. So a lot of the ideas that I was writing about then were just very fresh, about how do we worship in the midst of trials. So fast forwarding a few years later, a lot of things have changed. A lot of things have gotten better with his health, and a lot of things have not. We pray for God to bless us, but what does it look like when I spend four or so years praying for healing for my husband that never comes? I feel like we’ve kind of gotten to a place of having to make a choice. Are we going to judge God based on our circumstances that we don’t understand, or are we going to choose to judge our circumstances based on what we know to be true about God? Not that I choose the right thing every day, but I’m learning that every morning when I wake up to choose to trust God.

"And that’s what 'Blessings' is about. It’s just considering that maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for. No one wants a brain tumor, and no one wants a severed marriage and these things that we pray that God will reconcile. But even though this situation is definitely nothing that we ever would have asked for or prayed for, there has been a depth of intimacy with the Lord that I’m not sure I would have known apart from such a hard road that we’ve walked. And in the end, if I’ve learned to cling to that old rugged cross all the more, I truly can say that I’m a blessed person."

http://laurastorymusic.com/2011/09/story-behind-the-song-“blessings”/

Isn't that a paradoxical insight: "maybe the blessing is actually found in the absence of the thing that I’m praying for"? I wonder what Laura means by learning "to cling to that old rugged cross". (It was a favourite funeral hymn among Stanford villagers, which always fascinated me...!) I suspect it's to do with learning to trust the love of the crucified God in the teeth of everything.