Two Minutes at the Drop-Off

The man in the yellow jacket is already waving them forward before the car has stopped, because the drop-off lane at this airport is two minutes long and everybody in it is trying to make two minutes hold a whole person.

She puts the hazard lights on. Her brother is out of the passenger seat before she has the handbrake up, round to the boot, lifting the big case with the strap he bought specially and the small one with their mother's soup in it, three containers wrapped in tea towels, because a man going to the far side of the world for a contract with no end date is still a man who might want soup. Their mother is in the back and will not get out. She said her goodbyes at the house, at the door, in the hall, and again at the roundabout, and she has run out, and now she is looking at the side of the terminal building as if it has said something to her.

All around them the same thing is happening. A father lifting a small girl so she can be kissed by everybody twice. Two students with one trolley between them, arguing about whose bag goes on top. A taxi driver with a paper cup, tapping his own wrist at a couple who are not finished. Sliding doors, opening and closing on the warm air inside, and the sound of announcements nobody can make out.

She has had words in her all week. On Wednesday she wrote some on the back of an envelope and left it in the kitchen drawer with the takeaway menus. Something over him. Something with God in it, said on purpose, before he goes through those doors, because there is a real chance she does not get another door. He hugs her hard and quick, the way he has hugged her since he was fourteen, and what comes out of her mouth is, "Text me when you land."

"I will."

"And eat the soup."

The man in the yellow jacket is at her window now, patient and firm. Her brother lifts a hand, and the doors open for him, and close.

And you know this curb. You have stood on it. Maybe it was a curb, and maybe it was a bed with a rail on it and a nurse changing shifts, and maybe it was the last phone call before the number stopped being answered. Someone was going, you had every word in you except the one you meant, and the two minutes ran out.

The blessing that says go

You are safe here, so let us name it gently. You have been trying to hold them and bless them with the same breath, and a mouth cannot do both. The words that came out at the curb were holding words: text me, eat, be careful, call. Holding words are love, and nobody is putting them on trial in this room. But holding words are aimed at the leaving. They try to make it smaller, later, safer, something that might yet turn round. And under the holding words sat the real reason the blessing would not come: a fear that to bless the going was to sign it. To say the LORD keep you where I cannot follow felt like agreeing that you cannot follow. So you said text me instead, and the doors closed, and the sentence with God in it is still in the drawer with the menus. The Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by that drawer, and the word of God has not gone stale in it.

Now come and stand on a road with a woman who had lost more than what is leaving you today. Naomi is walking out of Moab with two young widows, her sons' wives, and somewhere on that road she stops and turns to them.

"Go, return each of you to her mother's house. May the LORD deal kindly with you, as you have dealt with the dead and with me. The LORD grant that you may find rest, each of you in the house of her husband." Then she kissed them, and they lifted up their voices and wept.Ruth 1:8-9

Look at what she does. She blesses them to go. Not stay and I will bless you. Not come with me and then we shall see. She puts God's kindness over a road she cannot walk with them, and then she kisses them, and then everybody cries. Orpah kisses her back and goes, and the scroll never sees Orpah again. Not one more verse. And nothing in the text says Naomi's blessing failed. It went down that road with her, out of the story, into a life the writer did not follow, and the Spirit of God kept it in the scroll as the LORD's kindness over her head.

So hear this at your curb.

You have a blessing to say, and it does not need the leaving to reverse in order to be true. I am not handing you my own comfort. This is written in Ruth 1, in the mouth of a woman standing at a fork with her whole family behind her in the ground, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a blessing down a road you cannot walk. The words are God's, the going is theirs, and the keeping is His.

Where the watch is kept

There is an older blessing, spoken over a heap of stones by two men who did not much trust each other. Laban and Jacob part at Mizpah, and the word Laban says over the gap between them is this: the LORD watch between you and me, when we are out of one another's sight (Genesis 31:49). Read it slowly. It does not say we shall meet again. It says where God is. It puts a watchman on the space that is about to open between two people, and it leaves the space open.

That is what a blessing at a leaving does. It names where God is, and it never pretends to know where the person is going to be. The Bible is honest about doors that do not open twice. Paul kneels on a beach at Miletus with the elders from Ephesus, and Luke tells us they wept most of all because of the word he had spoken, that they would not see his face again (Acts 20:38). And they knelt on the sand and prayed anyway. The not-seeing-again did not make the prayer smaller. It made the prayer the only thing left worth saying.

You are not asked to promise them a return. You are asked to name a keeping. Scripture is plain about the partings it does not undo, and it still sets a blessing at every one of them, and the Spirit of God is not thinner on the far side of a departure gate than He is in your kitchen. Whatever the road does, He is on it before they are.

Kept where you cannot follow

Now the words themselves, because you need them short enough to say from memory at a curb. God gave them to Moses to give to Aaron, and they have not worn out. The LORD bless you and keep you. The LORD make His face shine upon you and be gracious to you. The LORD lift up His countenance upon you and give you peace (Numbers 6:24-26).

Sit with keep. The Hebrew word underneath it is the word for a watchman on a wall through the night, the word for tending a garden so nothing gets in that should not. It is a night-watch word. And it is His job in the sentence, not yours. Bless you and keep you: both verbs have the LORD as their subject, and the person saying it is only the mouth. Then, His face. The face is the one thing you cannot send with them. Your face stops at the sliding doors, at the rail of the bed, at the end of the line. His does not. His face shines on them in a country you have never seen and in a room you are not allowed into and on the far side of a silence you did not choose.

You have been given these words. Not invented, given. God said, so shall they put My name upon the people, and I will bless them (Numbers 6:27), and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts the name where your hand cannot reach. What you carry to the curb is His name and His word; what you leave there is His name and His word; and both of them go through the doors when you do not.

One more thing, and I will say it plainly because a blessing that pretends is only a wish in a borrowed coat. I will not tell you that you will see them again in this life. I do not know that, and neither does anyone else who loves you enough to sit at this curb with you. What I know is written down. He keeps. His face is toward them. He goes where you cannot follow. That is the whole of what you are asked to say, and it is enough to fill a mouth.

And it does not need nearness. Where the person is already gone, or where standing in front of them is not safe or not welcome, you bless from where you are. Naomi's blessing did not need Orpah's address. It needed a mouth, and God's word in it, and a road, and the Spirit of God who was on that road before either of them.