❓ What are blessings?¶
Estimated time to read: 3 minutes
General Conference¶
For example, a subtle but significant blessing we receive is the spiritual gift of gratitude that enables our appreciation for what we have to constrain desires for what we want. A grateful person is rich in contentment. An ungrateful person suffers in the poverty of endless discontentment.
[We can be blessed with] the spiritual gift of enhanced discernment that can empower us to identify job opportunities that many other people might overlook—or the blessing of greater personal determination to search harder and longer for a position than other people may be able or willing to do. We might want and expect a job offer, but the blessing that comes to us through heavenly windows may be greater capacity to act and change our own circumstances rather than expecting our circumstances to be changed by someone or something else.
We might want and expect a larger paycheck, but the blessing that comes to us through heavenly windows may be greater capacity to change our own circumstances rather than expecting our circumstances to be changed by someone or something else.
*Assurance, peace, faith, and hope initially might not seem like the blessings warriors in battle might want, but they were precisely the blessings these valiant young men needed to press forward and prevail physically and spiritually.”
— The Windows of Heaven, Elder David A. Bednar, General Conference October 2013
We could reframe this advice to fit into mindfulness; accept what comes. We could also see this as a justification for why, when you’re promised vague, intangible blessings, that you end up with nothing.
Another letter came from a woman who had been divorced. Although she said that the ten years that followed her divorce were a time of trial, heartache, struggle, and loneliness, she described that experience as “a blessing”—“a refining process.” She expressed gratitude “for what I now have. It has brought me so close to my Heavenly Father and particularly to the Lord Jesus Christ. It is a feeling that I’m not sure can be expressed in words. I literally came before the Lord with a broken heart and a contrite spirit. No physical pain I have ever experienced has been as painful as the emotional pain I have felt. But each time I feel it, it draws me so close to the Lord because I think of all He suffered, and it makes me so grateful. I love Him with all my heart and soul for His sacrifice and for all He represents.”
— Modern Pioneers, Elder Dallin H. Oaks of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, General Conference 1989 October
Magazines¶
Our challenges can be blessings. If we will “pray always, and be believing” as we experience our challenges, Heavenly Father can turn them to our good (see Doctrine and Covenants 90:24; see also Romans 8:28).
— God Can Help Us in Hard Times, Liahona, 2022 July
The Lord blesses us with trials to refine us as individuals and to help us turn to Him and to our companions.
— The Challenges Are the Blessings, Ensign, 2014 June
It’s difficult to say that this tragedy has been a blessing. I hate being blessed by tragedy, but I have been. We might say we want the blessings and no trials, but that’s not how mortality works.
— Finding Blessings in Tragedy, Liahona, April 2021
So… What in the golly-goddamn are blessings, then?