Eleven Years Of Fridays

The candles are lit and the bread is under the cloth and the small one is already reaching for it, which she does every week, and everybody laughs, which they also do every week.

Then you stand up and they come to you in order of age, which nobody decided, it simply happened years ago and has never changed.

You put your hand on the oldest one's head first. You say the words. You have said them so many times that your hand knows where to go before you have finished thinking about it. Then the next. Then the next. Then the small one, who stands very still for it, which she does for nothing else all week.

Eleven years. Every Friday. Through the year you lost the job, through the winter your father was ill, through the three months when the house was so cold you all sat in one room. You have never once missed it and you have never once said it without meaning it.

And you sit back down and pass the bread.

And nobody has ever put a hand on your head.

Not once in eleven years. Not because they would refuse. Because it has genuinely never occurred to a single person in that room, including you, that the man who says the blessing might stand under one.

Listen, before anything else.

I am not accusing you of anything.

There is nothing missing in you and there is nothing wrong with what happens at that table. It is one of the best things I know of. God has been in every one of those Fridays and He has not sighed over the arrangement once.

I am saying I noticed there is one head in that room that nobody covers. That is all.

What the blessing was for

Go back to the beginning of it, to the first man who was ever handed this.

And I will make of thee a great nation, and I will bless thee, and make thy name great; and thou shalt be a blessing.Genesis 12:2

Now count the order, because the order is the entire thing and almost nobody reads it slowly enough to see it.

I will bless thee. First.

And make thy name great. Second.

And thou shalt be a blessing. Third, and last, and only after the other two.

Abraham did not become a blessing by generating one. He became a blessing because he was blessed first and the overflow went outward. The direction of the whole sentence runs from God, into the man, and then out through him to everybody else. Take the first clause away and the third one has nothing to run on.

So I want to turn now and speak this over you, with your hand still smelling faintly of the candles.

You are blessed first. Not one day, not once the children are grown, not in some general sense that includes the household. Right now, sitting back down at your own table, you are the one the first clause is about, and the eleven years of Fridays are the third clause, which is downstream. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who sets a written line down in a real man on a real Friday evening.

Now, why has it never occurred to anybody, including you?

Because the man who does a thing becomes, in everybody's mind including his own, the machinery of the thing. At that table on a Friday, nobody sees a person. They see the moment in the evening when the blessing happens.

That is not sin. That is what happens to somebody who has been dependable for a very long time. Dependable people get turned into furniture by the people who love them most, and they do most of the turning themselves.

But look at what the text does not say. It does not say thou shalt be a blessing, and therefore thou shalt not be blessed. Nothing about being the channel takes a man out of the flow. Abraham was blessed for the rest of his life and he never stopped being the one it went through.

And this next part is settled rather than pending, so hear it. You have a blessing over you that did not start when you started saying one. The word says I will bless thee before it says anything about what you will do, and it is His Spirit who carries a written promise from a page into a real house on a real night when the candles are still burning.

The one who lays the hand has a head too. That has been true for eleven years and nobody noticed, and God noticed every week.