You Blessed A Table You Could Not Taste

He has said the blessing over that family for nineteen years, and in June he said it over their daughter at her wedding, and he felt absolutely nothing.

He knows the exact moment. He had his hands up. The room had gone quiet in the way rooms do when everybody knows what is coming next. Her father was crying and not hiding it. And he opened his mouth and said the words he has said at every table and every doorway and every graveside in that community since he was twenty seven, and they came out perfectly, in the right voice, at the right pace, and inside him there was nothing at all.

He wants two things understood.

First, it was not distraction. He was not thinking about the parking or the next thing in the diary. He was entirely present, looking at a girl he baptized, meaning every syllable.

Second, it landed. He could see it landing. Her mother said afterwards that she would carry that minute for the rest of her life, and she was not being polite; that woman does not say things she does not mean and never has.

And he stood there afterwards with a glass of something in his hand, being congratulated, and felt like a man who had handed round a dish he could not taste.

Here is what has grown out of it since June, and it has grown quietly, in the way these things do. He has started to hear his own blessing differently. When he says it now at a doorway he is half listening to himself, checking, and the checking has a question underneath it, and the question is: is anything actually happening here, or have I been saying a beautiful sentence over people for nineteen years.

He has not stopped. He would not. But there is a man in that community who blesses everybody and goes home and wonders whether he is a priest or a very good speaker of a very old line.

Read the sentence after the blessing

Everybody knows the blessing in Numbers 6. It is the oldest one still in use, and it gets said over congregations every week all over the world. The Lord bless thee and keep thee; the Lord make his face shine upon thee.

Almost nobody reads the line after it, and the line after it is the whole engine.

And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel; and I will bless them.Numbers 6:27

Read what that sentence divides.

The priests put the name on. That is the whole of their job description in the verse. They speak, they lay the name over the people, and then the sentence turns and God says what He does, and what He does is bless them.

Two different verbs. Two different parties. And there is not one clause anywhere in the paragraph about how the priest should feel while he is doing it.

So hear this, over a courtyard table in June: nothing failed that day. That is not my kindness to you; it is what His word says is going on when a blessing is spoken, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my sentence who takes a division of labor like that and turns it into rest in a man who has been quietly auditing himself since the summer.

Now watch what that does to the wedding.

If the blessing runs on the one saying it, then a dry priest is a broken instrument and a wedding is a bad day to be one. That is the case that has been running in your head. But Numbers gives the blessing away from you before you ever start speaking. You put the name on. He blesses. Which means what her mother will carry for the rest of her life came from God, arrived through a man who felt nothing, and lost precisely none of its weight on the way through.

That is not a diminishing of you. It is the opposite. A conduit is not a lesser thing than a source; it is the thing God chose to use, and He chose a person and not a printed card, and He has kept choosing you for nineteen years including in June.

And I want to name what has grown since, because the checking is doing you more damage than the dryness ever did.

You have begun listening to yourself while you speak, looking for evidence. That is a hard way to live and it will not tell you anything, because the evidence you are looking for was never located in you. Scripture puts the effect of a blessing entirely in God's column, and the Holy Spirit does not ask a man to verify his own instrumentation before He will move through it.

You are carrying the Name right now, in every doorway you have stood in this month, whether or not one thing in your chest confirms it. That is what His word says the priest does, and the Holy Spirit is the one doing the blessing at the other end of it.

Let me put one more thing in your hand, because it is the tender part. You said you felt like a man handing round a dish he could not taste. Notice what that image admits: there was a dish. Something real was on the table. Your trouble in June was never that the food was absent. It was that you were hungry at your own feast and had nowhere to say so.