You have read her the racing results. That is where you have got to.
Day one you talked properly. You said the things. You said them well, actually, better than you had expected, and she squeezed your hand at one point and you have thought about that squeeze roughly nine hundred times since.
Day three you were still going. The grandchildren, what the garden is doing, the business with your brother's roof.
Day six you started reading things out. The paper. A letter from the surgery. And then, on Sunday, because there was nothing else on that page, the racing results, out loud, to a woman who has never had a bet in fifty-one years of marriage.
It is day nine.
There has been no response since day two. The nurses are kind and careful about what they will and will not say, and you have stopped asking because you can see they cannot answer and it is unfair to keep putting them in that position.
And what happened this morning is that you came in, and sat down, and opened your mouth, and nothing came out. Not from emotion. From having nothing left. You sat there with your coat still on for about eleven minutes in complete silence, and then you got up and got a coffee you did not want.
You have started to feel foolish. That is the honest word for it. Foolish, talking to a room.
The psalm turns and speaks to Him in that verse
Sit down. Coat off or on, it does not matter. I am not going to tell you she can hear you, because I do not know that and neither does anybody in that building.
Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me being brisk with a man on day nine: reading the racing results out loud to your wife is not a failure of anything. It is a man who has run out of material staying in the room anyway, which is the whole of what love looks like at this stage, and it is a great deal more than most people manage. Nobody in this room is on trial.
Now come and look at the most familiar psalm there is, and notice a change in it that people read past for their whole lives.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.Psalm 23:4
Read the first three verses again in your head. He maketh me. He leadeth me. He restoreth my soul. All of it about Him, in the third person. David is describing God to somebody else.
And then he walks into the valley, and the grammar changes, and it never changes back. For thou art with me. From that verse to the end of the psalm, David is not describing God any more. He is talking to Him.
That is not a literary accident. It is what happens to a man in the dark: he stops explaining God and starts addressing Him. The valley is where the third person runs out.
You have arrived at exactly the verse where the psalm stops describing and starts speaking, and God has never once required an answer before speech is worth making. That is not me consoling a man on a hard afternoon. That is what is written, and what happens to the grammar in that psalm, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a hospice room at four o'clock.
Here is what nobody explains at a bedside. When you speak a blessing over your wife, you are not reaching her and you are not producing anything in her. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about a woman He made. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not need her to squeeze your hand for the door to be open.
A blessing is the one thing you can say in that room that does not require a reply. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing (Ephesians 1:3), settled, past tense, finished, and the Spirit is the one who carries a word from heaven through the mouth of a husband in a chair, and none of it depends on day nine going differently from day eight.
Why it started to feel foolish
Now let me name it properly, because the word you used matters and I do not want it left lying there.
What is written has a second kind of speech in it, and the Spirit has been carrying that kind for thousands of years. Everything you have said in that room for nine days has been conversational. The grandchildren, the garden, the roof, the racing results. Conversation is built for two people. It has a shape that expects a reply, and the shape survives for a while on memory and then it starts to sag, and a man talking in a conversational shape into a silence eventually feels the sag and calls it foolishness.
That is not a spiritual failure and it is not a lack of love, and what is written never once graded a man on it, and the Spirit is not standing at that bed with a stopwatch. It is a genre problem. You have been using the only form of speech most people have, and it is the wrong form for this room.
A blessing is a different genre entirely. It is not built for two. It goes over a person, not between two people. It expects nothing back and it does not sag, because there is nothing in its shape that is waiting.
There is a kind of speech built for exactly this room, and it has been used in rooms like this for thousands of years. It is written that God told the priests to put His name upon the people and He would bless them (Numbers 6:27), which is a form of words designed to be said over somebody rather than to them, and the Spirit has been carrying it that way ever since.
Hear what I am not doing, and it matters more here than almost anywhere. I am not telling you she hears it. I do not know and I will not pretend to. And I am not telling you that saying it changes anything about what is happening in that bed. What God does in this is His, entirely, and any man who hands you a promise at a hospice bedside is taking something from you at the worst possible moment.
What you say over her stands over her whether or not it reaches her. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man of seventy-three saying twenty words to a woman who cannot answer is not talking to a room.
So here is what is true in that room, on day nine at four o'clock.
The blessing exists. God settled it in Christ before you and she ever met, it is written down where anybody can go and read it, and the Holy Spirit is here in this room. What is missing is not the words, and it is certainly not your love for that woman. What is missing is one sentence that is not waiting for anything.
You are the one God put in that chair, and having run out of things to say has never once disqualified anybody from it. Nobody has ever had to be answered to be used for this. Faith is an open hand and not a performance, God is the one who fills the hand, and the Spirit does the carrying; what He carries is what is written.
I am not going to tell you how long, or what she registers, or what happens on day ten. That belongs to God, and I will not stand at that bed and guess at your wife. What I can tell you is what is already settled, because it is written and I am only reading it out where you can hear it: the psalm stops describing God and starts speaking to Him at the exact verse where the valley begins, and it never goes back.
Nine days of conversation into a silence. Say something over her instead.
Declare this over yourself
Say these sitting in that chair, out loud, quietly, because a blessing is spoken and not thought. You have the standing to say them, and not because you have found the right words at last. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, so the authority to speak God's word over your own wife is His authority, handed to you and carried by His Spirit. Scripture says whoever speaks to the mountain and does not doubt shall have what he says. Says. Out loud. So say it here, to eleven minutes of silence with your coat still on this morning. What God does in that bed is His to decide, and none of it is yours to produce.
- Nine days of a room that does not answer, you are long and you are not empty. Scripture says though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, Thou art with me, and the psalm turns and speaks straight to Him in that verse and never turns back.
- Word foolish that arrived in my chest this morning, get out of this room in the name of Jesus. It is written that God puts His name on His people and does the blessing Himself, and a word said over somebody was never waiting for a reply.
- Lord, You are in this room and You were here before I came in with my coat on. I thank You, because Your face is shining on my wife this afternoon and Your Spirit is the one carrying it, and I have both hands round hers and I am saying it out loud.
Psalm 23:4
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