The Step Does Not Keep Score

He has his keys out before he is through the door, the way he has had them out every Sunday for a year, and she says it anyway.

"The LORD bless you and keep you." He is already on the second step. "The LORD make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you." He lifts a hand without turning round, which is what he does instead of answering. "The LORD lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace." The car door. The engine. The little wave through the windscreen that means he is not angry with her, he is just done.

She stands on the step until the tail lights turn at the end of the road, because that is part of it too now, and then she goes back inside to a kitchen that still smells of the roast and a table with one plate on it he did not finish. Fifty-two Sundays. She has said the same twenty-nine words over him fifty-two times, and she could tell you exactly what has changed in him because of it, which is nothing. He does not pray. He does not come to anything. He does not stay past the coffee. If anything he leaves a little faster than he did in the spring, and she has caught herself, more than once, wondering whether the blessing is the reason.

Here is the thought she does not say to anybody at church, because they would look at her the way you look at someone who has misunderstood the assignment. I have been speaking God's word over my son every week for a year and I cannot see one thing it has done. So either the word does not work, or I do not.

If you have stood on that step, you already know which of the two she picked. People like her always pick themselves.

The farmer who was not allowed to watch

Come and stand in a field with me. Jesus tells a story here that almost nobody preaches on, because it has no villain in it and nothing goes wrong. A man scatters seed on the ground. Then Jesus tells you what the man does next, and it is the most ordinary sentence in the Gospels.

You are inside the parable He chose for exactly this, and He chose the one in which the man sleeps and rises and does not know how. That is what is written in Mark 4 and it is the picture He picked on purpose, and the Spirit is the one doing the work underneath while nobody at all is permitted to watch it.

The kingdom of God is as if a man should scatter seed on the ground. He sleeps and rises night and day, and the seed sprouts and grows; he knows not how. The earth produces by itself, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear.Mark 4:26-28

He sleeps and rises. Night and day. That is the whole of the man's part after the scattering: he goes to bed and he gets up. And while he is doing that, the seed does the one thing seed does, and the text is careful, almost stubborn, about how much the man understands of it. He knows not how. Not "he watches closely." Not "he checks the soil each morning and adjusts." He does not know how it grows and he is not told, and the harvest arrives anyway.

Now hear me, mother on the step. You are that farmer, and the word you scattered over your son is that seed. I am not saying that to make you feel better; I am saying it because it is written, in Isaiah, that the word which goes out of God's mouth does not return to Him empty but accomplishes what He sent it for, and because the Holy Spirit is the one who takes twenty-nine words said on a doorstep and carries them into places you have never been allowed to see. What you said was His word before it was ever in your mouth. So the growing was never going to be your department.

Let us name the weight honestly before we lift it, because you have been carrying it up those steps for a year. It is not that you doubt God. It is that you have quietly turned the blessing into a machine: word in, change out, and when the change did not come out the other end you did the arithmetic on yourself. He is not different, so I did it wrong. Said it too flat. Said it while I was still hurt about the thing he said at Easter. Should have put my hand on his head. Should have meant it more. Sister, that arithmetic is not faith. It is a tape measure, and I want to take it out of your hand.

The blessing was never yours to make work

Look at what a blessing actually is. In Numbers 6 God gives Aaron the exact words to say over the people, and then He says the thing that settles this whole matter. They shall put My name upon the people, and I will bless them. Aaron says it. God does it. The priest is not the power; he is the mouth. The name is put on and the blessing is God's own act, and the text draws that line so cleanly you could cut yourself on it.

You have never once been the one blessing your son. You have been the one putting the Name on him, which is what the Word gave you to do and what the Spirit of God has been doing through you every time you opened your mouth on that step, whether or not you felt a thing while you did it. Say that slowly and let it land: the blessing is not your work that God signs off on. It is His work that you announce.

That is why the question "is it working" is the wrong question, and I say that with all the tenderness I have, because it is the question I would ask too. A wish has to work. A technique has to work. A blessing does not have to work; a blessing has to be true, and it was true the first Sunday, and it is true this Sunday, and it does not become less true because your son drove off in the middle of it. Paul says he planted and Apollos watered but God gave the growth, so that neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. Neither is anything. Not a failure. Not a success. Not a thing to be graded at all. Just a mouth, and a hand with seed in it, and a God who does the rest.

You are free from measuring him, and you have been free from it since the first word left your mouth. The written word puts the growth in God's hands and nowhere else, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your Sunday performance, who makes a word live in the ground where you cannot see it. Nobody hung a yardstick round your neck. You picked it up because you love him and because a year is a long time, and both of those things are to your credit and neither of them is your job.