I possess the leisure of asking questions like, Am I blessed or lucky? This is a testament to my comfortable life, and my pedantic nature. It may also involve just a tiny bit of reputation management. I don’t want to say I’m lucky, as though I’ve left my destiny to a four-leafed clover. But I don’t want to say I’m blessed and be seen as a rare recipient of God’s favor.

I suppose I could dispense with both words and use something else altogether—maybe grateful. Still, there are connotations I don’t like. What if people think I’m grateful for ev-er-y-thing, or that I avoid talking about hard stuff because—you know—I’m just grateful. Why is it so damn hard to manage my reputation?

The church taught me not to say lucky—because luck’s got nothing to do with it. But as I near my 40^th birthday, I’m fairly certain luck has everything to do with it. Luck means things happen to me because things happen. I can have bad luck or good luck, divorced from my character, my actions, and the circumstances preceding said luck.

In in a much less haphazard fashion, blessed seems to mean God is smiling down on me and providing extra special things, probably because of my good character. Or at least because I’m praying. You know the verse to that children’s song about the wise man and the foolish man—“the blessings come down as the prayers go up”? I take that to mean when I stop praying I’ll stop being blessed. Yes, the Lord makes the sun shine and the rain fall on the good and the evil (Matthew 5:45)… but surely draughts in California have something to do with legislation, and floods in Louisiana serve to tighten the Bible belt a notch or two.

The protestant work ethic suggests that accepting luck into my worldview will cause me to sit on my keister all day and wait for the garden to grow. As Mrs. Marcus complained in the comedy It’s a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, “This whole country is just full of people, who when these things happen they just say, ‘these things happen,’ and that’s why they happen!” This sentiment implies that if I worked harder I could be in control. Maybe if I prayed harder I’d have a more predictable life, good health until I die, financial security, children who stay “in the church,” and a permanent smile on my face. It’s laughable, really.

But isn’t every good gift from God? Is this a distribution problem? God’s blessings flow forth from Her heart of love, but the weather patterns dump them across the world haphazardly, piled up in some areas and entirely missing in others? In that case, blessed is really identical to lucky—I happened to be born in a wealthy country to parents who provided a stable home. I married a 22-year-old who happened to mature into an attentive and wise life partner. Like a video-game-player spawning into a game, I appeared here in a resource-rich environment. And I’m enjoying the benefits.

Everything I have is something a billion people don’t have—happy marriage, good health, both parents alive and still married, big house in a safe neighborhood, a comfortable wardrobe, not to mention the three meals I chew daily with well-cared-for teeth. It is tempting to wonder if God likes me better.

I’m not making much headway here. Thankfully, Elizabeth Gilbert leads me to the heart of the matter. In her book Eat, Pray, Love, she defines destiny as, “a play between divine grace and willful self-effort. Half of it you have no control over; half of it is absolutely in your hands, and your actions will show measurable consequence. Man is neither entirely a puppet of the gods, nor is he entirely the captain of his own destiny; he’s a little of both.”

There’s something underneath, a philosophy, a worldview. If I use the word luck to strip away all agency, lie down, and let life roll over me, I’ve become a puppet. If I use the word blessed to assign myself too much agency, I put God on puppet strings, and that can’t be good. But if I use either word to relax into the goodness of my life, the scales may tip from control to celebration. Celebration implies there is goodness worth noticing and lingering over, worth sharing with friends and family.

God blesses me.

Also, I’m just lucky.