Gesundheit! Here, Have a Blessing!

My neighbor, Bruce, is a retired art teacher. Or maybe professor. I am not sure. But, he is definitely retired, and he definitely paints. Last fall, he offered to paint a portrait of my daughter, gratis. This is something he does for all of the young people in the neighborhood, because he wants to, and because he can.

I get the sense that Bruce paints portraits like my mom sews. My mother is a professional-caliber seamstress, and has made custom draperies and clothing for handsome sums. Years ago, though, she decided that she wouldn’t sew for money anymore; she would only sew for love. Now, she sews doll clothes for her grandchildren, remakes worn-out madrigal dresses for teenagers at church, and sews pillows for heart surgery patients and cancer patients.

Bruce paints from photos, so he asked if Cora and I could meet him at a nearby church to take some. He took endless photos of Cora in her sports chair, holding her blue-and-red Molten basketball (official basketball of the NWBA) in various positions, smiling, giggling, wearing her “game face.” At one point, he looked at me and said, “Mom, let’s do a few with you. Just because.” So—even though I was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt and ratty hair and no makeup—I sat behind my girl, and we both held her basketball and smiled. After a few seconds, Cora laid her head sideways on my shoulder, and Bruce snapped the photo.

“Ohhhhhhhh,” he said. “That’s it. That’s the shot.”

So, instead of painting Cora’s portrait, he painted us both, Cora’s head on my shoulder, her Molten basketball in front of us, her basketball hoop and another neighbor’s crepe myrtles blooming behind it.

He texted me to let me know it was finished. He came with his wife, and stood on our porch to deliver it. “I like to offer a prayer when I do this,” he said. “I want this to be a blessing to people.”

So we stood on the porch with Bruce and LaDona, and he prayed over Cora, and me, and the portrait that he’d painted.

And I thought about my mom, sewing for love, and surgery patients padding their incisions with her heart-shaped pillows, and self-conscious high school students performing in dresses that she tailored for them, and grandchildren whose dolls wear bespoke clothing made by a professional-caliber seamstress.

A gift made with skill and freely given is a blessing. Never doubt it.

So, when you make food and give it away, you are blessing the people it is given to.

When you repair your neighbor’s lawn care equipment or their car or their busted screen door, you have blessed them.

When you help someone else with their resume or cover letter or job application, you have blessed them.

When you show someone how to put together an outfit and accessorize it so that they look right for that important occasion, you have blessed them.

Whatever your skill is, even if it’s one you don’t think of as “a skill,” like getting a stain out of a shirt or cleaning the scale from a coffee pot (true story; I learned this from a woman at church who casually descaled my coffee pot without even seeming to know that she had just taught me something), if you offer it to someone else without asking anything in return, you have blessed them.

This portrait captures a brief, spontaneous instant with my girl, but it took a lifetime’s worth of skill to do it. It is a great blessing to me, and I expect that it will be for a long time to come. I could, at this point, tell you that I am greatly blessed, perhaps even undeservedly blessed, but honestly? I think that way of looking at it is backwards. I would rather say, as Bruce himself said it, that Bruce has blessed me and Cora, in an unanticipated and delightful way. And I would rather say that I had blessed others, than to claim that I myself have been blessed.

What about you? Have you blessed someone today? Other than when they sneezed?

I’m certainly going to make it a goal.

To see more of Bruce’s art, look him up here.