Nothing Said Over Me

The side door of that building opens onto four parking spaces and a bin store, and Petra has gone out through it most weeks for about six years.

It is not avoidance. It is the coats. Her coat hangs nearest that end, and the main door takes eleven minutes because of the talking, and she has a lift to give and a dog at home, and so she goes out the side, and the door swings shut behind her with a heavy noise she could pick out of a hundred doors.

And this is the thing she has never once mentioned to anybody, because there is no way to say it without sounding as though she is complaining about people who have done her no wrong.

Nothing gets said over her.

Not there. Not anywhere. She goes in, she sits, she stands, she sings, she is thanked once a quarter for doing the flowers, and she goes out through a side door into four parking spaces, and nobody has said any words over her since she stood at the front of a church at twenty-four in a dress her aunt made.

Twenty-nine years. She worked it out last month while she was doing something else, and it stopped her where she stood.

Her weeks end. That is the shape of it. They do not close, they just stop, and she goes into the next one carrying whatever the last one gave her, and no one has ever stood at a door and said anything over her going.

You know whether this is you. Most people do, immediately, because it is one of those absences that you can feel the shape of even though nothing is there. You are dismissed a great deal. You are sent out almost never.

And they are not the same thing, and your soul has always known it, whatever your diary says.

The oldest words anybody has

Long before there were churches with side doors, God gave a family of priests a set of words and told them to say them over people. Not to think them. To say them, out loud, over ordinary human beings who were about to go back to their animals and their fields.

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 face toward you and give you peace.Numbers 6:24 to 26

Three lines, and in the Hebrew they are three words, then five, then seven. It opens out as it goes, like a hand opening, and whoever built it built it that way on purpose.

But the thing I want you to see is not the shape. It is who is doing what.

Every single verb in it belongs to God. Bless, keep, shine, be gracious, lift, give. The priest is not doing any of it. He is not generating a blessing out of his own goodness and handing it over, and he is not conditional and he is not negotiating. He is a mouth. He says the words and God does the things.

Which means the blessing does not depend on the quality of the man saying it. And it means, and here is where it comes to you in a car park, that it does not depend on there being a man at all.

There is nothing in those words that requires a building. They were given to be said over people, and they have been said over shepherds and soldiers and frightened girls and dying men for three thousand years, in tents and kitchens and doorways and at gravesides, by people with no title whatsoever.

They are not a professional's property. They are the oldest words anybody has for sending somebody out, and they were written down precisely so that nobody would ever have to invent their own.

That is the whole genius of a borrowed prayer, and it is worth saying to you plainly, Petra, because you have spent twenty-nine years assuming that if nobody said anything over you it was because you had not earned anything being said. Nothing written in Scripture makes a blessing something earned, and the Holy Spirit has never once withheld one on those terms.

It is not about earning. It never was. The words were handed down so that a person with nothing left in them could still be sent out under something, in words that were made long before their bad week and will outlast it.

And notice the last line, because it is the one that answers the side door.

The LORD lift up His face toward you. Lifting the face is what you do when you look up at somebody who is leaving. It is the opposite of a turned back. It is the opposite of a door swinging shut behind you with a heavy noise while nobody watches you go.

Somebody has been lifting His face toward you every single week for six years in that car park. Nobody has ever said so out loud.

I am going to say it now, and then I am going to put the words in your mouth, and this is not a task and it is not a challenge and there is nothing here for you to get right. It is a blessing. That is all it is.