Over 20 years ago, I was gently admonished by a wonderful man.  Reverend KIrk was the leader of an organization in which I participated.  He was a very tall man, with a beautiful smile and a loving presence.  He was the head of a group of community leaders, many of them pastors, that came together after a tragedy.  It was a very diverse group, with congregations of all faiths in the community.  It was formed as a reaction to racially motivated murders that had taken place.  In the aftermath of this tragedy, people were moved to act in a positive way, by joining forces to deal with this horrific event.

To be in contact with all these wonderful people gave me a sense of peace and possibility.  But it is Reverend Kirk who taught me a lesson I will never forget.  It was about the word “lucky.”  I was talking to him and used that word to describe how grateful I was about something.  I don’t remember what it was about.  But, I remember what he said.  It was simple.  You are not lucky, you are blessed.

Those simple words affected me dramatically.  I wasn’t really thinking about the meaning of lucky.  It was just something people said when something good happened, and I was one of them.  

I decided to look it up.  Here is Merriam-Webster’s definition:

1 : having good luck. 2 : happening by chance : fortuitous. 3 : producing or resulting in good by chance : favorable. 4 : seeming to bring good luck, a lucky rabbit’s foot.

Check out numbers 2 and 3.  Notice the word “chance” in both definitions.  This cinches the real meaning of lucky.  It refers to just being in the right place at the right time.  Using this word took God out of the equation.  Luck is happenstance.  Blessing is a gift, a grace.

I had never considered the use of this word as being important enough to question its validity.  What I found out was that by using the word “lucky,” I was diminishing the good that was being given to me.  This did not jive with my beliefs.  He simply taught me a lesson that makes me so grateful to him.  He has passed on and I miss his presence.  But he is still with me in a way. I think of him every time I hear the word “lucky.”  I was blessed to know him.  Luck had nothing to do with it.