Be Blessed (Guest Post by Brendan)

If any of you know me (Brendan) well enough, you know that I struggle with the English language. I attempt to use "big" words when I do not even know the meaning, and that leads to it being out of context for the subject I am speaking of - or even better I may use the word correctly but it doesn't fit into the sentence very well as every other word would not score anything in a Scrabble game. I could blame this on a multitude of things, but I blame it on myself and my loathing of reading. It never really matter the type of book or what the cause was for, I have NEVER liked to read. Pizza Hut read-a-thons when I was a kid - I cheated to get the pizza at the end of the week. Book reports at any level of schooling - tried to rewrite the wording from the inside flap to pass as my own. Spanish class - what a joke - and we paid for that during our time in Spain.

So after traveling half way around the world and being in a location that readily has English available for me to read - my interest has sparked for Chinese. Not speaking it, as I have already learned my lesson with Spanish, but rather in reading it! It has to be one of the most foreign languages to that of English, but I am drawn to it by the numerous symbols that people tell me really do mean something. In my line of work there are a number of Chinese documents that pass through my desk and though I am years and years away from reading at a sufficient level, I still like to scan through to the document and look for the basic characters that I do know - mainly that an upside down Y is "people" and numbers 1,2,3 are horizontal lines that match their respective quantity. A couple other characters I can take a guess out and then after that I attempt to make it up based on what the symbol looks like. There is no alphabet to start with and I would guess that actually taking on the (insert big word here) would be way to much for me, especially because I have already admitted my loathing for reading. The only hope I have is that Chinese is made of pictures (characters) and I love looking at pictures to learn what they are about.

Take the title of this post - Be Blessed. The Chinese word for "blessed" is made up of four characters which describe the original blessedness of man. Wait, the original blessedness of which man - who could that even be referring to? Per the picture inserted below - one man in a garden, with the Divine!





I was shocked to learn the meaning of these characters. How is it possible? Adam was this man, created in the image of God and intended to enjoy an intimate relationship with Him - as a Christian this is an image of true blessedness, but to find it in a Chinese character has interested me greatly.

Through the past two weeks and our first Chinese New Year in Hong Kong, we experienced a lot of Chinese culture. This time of year is very important to them and many of the celebrations are in direct conflict with our beliefs. This new Chinese character that I learned was throughout the city on decorations and being shared amongst the people - though often times not based on the original intention of what it means to be Blessed.