Blessing?

​”Be a blessing to your neighbour.”

This is the only message from a person of the cloth which has stuck with me. I was in Form 2 or 3 and had gone to our home church over the holidays. Despite losing my faith, I still call it “our home church”, because I feel a kinship with and sense of ownership over it.

Over the years, the message became a prayer, to what or whom, I do not know. I do not even know why I pray, fervently sometimes. It seems incongruent for an atheist, atheist in the commonly understood sense, not the David Foster Wallace one. The prayer goes as follows,

“Let my money be a blessing to others and to myself.”

I wanted a new job, one which pays significantly more than my current one, to better take care of others and myself. The others are my siblings, my parents, and my friends. My prayers were answered and once I was told what I would be earning, my first thought was getting a new phone, quickly followed by how much more impressive I would be to people.

So much for being a blessing to others. What does this make me? A hypocrite? Or a human?