The Blessing Place Remembered

It was a spur of the moment thing. On the way home from a meeting I took a young man to a hilltop, parked on a connecting road between two plowed fields, and surveyed the valleys and the parade of hills beyond them. There I told him the good things I saw God doing in his life.

Over twenty years later I returned to that area to serve my final pastorate. By then the young man had grown older and had become a leader in that church; and almost as soon as we met he asked if I remembered the visit on the hilltop. 

Not long afterward I revisited that spot; and from that visit came a tradition. Over the next fourteen-years I took many men, young and old (including my four sons), to the road between the fields. 

The idea came from a general presence in Scripture of "blessing" others, and especially the blessing of a vision to those of the next generation. Jesus himself practiced it. Therefore, as a member of the older generation, or because of my pastoral position, or as a serious friend, I sought from the Lord the ones whom I might take to, “The Blessing Place.” I did not work from a list. Each trip was uniquely the result of a focus God brought to my prayers. For the most part it was for those who showed signs of the hand of God on their lives. Some were struggling, because they could not see what I could see.

Over time several have reminded me of the event. One afternoon I brought a friend to the hilltop and discovered a car parked a little farther ahead. A man whom I had brought there years earlier approached. Beside him walked a smiling girl with a sparkling ring on her finger. His purpose that afternoon was to use that venue to ask the girl one of the most important questions of his life. 

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