The Lord Bless You And Keep You

She made the mistake of asking, and she would not describe it as a mistake out loud, and it was.

Six people over about eight months. She did not go round collecting; it happened the way these things do, in ones, at the end of services and over coffee and once on a long car journey.

And every one of them was kind. That has to be said first. Not one of them was showing off and not one of them was cold, and two of them she would trust with anything.

The first said fasting. The second said community, that she had been too solitary and needed to be more known. The third said she should look at whether there was unconfessed sin, and said it gently, and it took two months to get out from under. The fourth said rest, that she was exhausted and this was a body thing. The fifth said the opposite of the fourth, in effect, and said discipline, that seasons like this are broken by turning up. The sixth said it would pass and not to think about it.

She is forty-nine.

And she is now carrying six programs, four of which contradict each other, and a low hum of guilt about not having implemented any of them properly, and she is measurably worse than she was before she said anything to anybody.

What God told them to say

There is a moment where God tells the priests exactly what words to put on His people, and it is worth noticing what kind of words He chose.

The LORD bless thee, and keep thee.Numbers 6:24

Read what that is and what it is not.

It is not advice. There is no instruction in it. Nobody hearing that is being told to do anything, or to adjust anything, or to try a practice for a fortnight and see.

It is a thing said over a person. The verbs belong to God, both of them, and the person on the receiving end is entirely passive in the sentence, which is exactly what a blessing is.

And this was not an occasional pastoral flourish. God commanded it, specified the wording, and told them to put His name on the people this way. When He was choosing what His people should have said over them, He did not choose a program.

You are somebody God commanded a blessing to be spoken over rather than a program to be handed to. That is not me dismissing everybody who has tried to help you; Numbers 6:24 is words God chose Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes them and lays them over a woman carrying six sets of instructions.

Why six kindnesses made it worse

Now let me be careful, because I am not going to run down six people who love you.

Some of what they said was probably true. You may well be tired. You may well have been solitary. The one who said it would pass may be right.

The problem is not the content. It is the form.

Every one of those six handed you a task. And a person in a dry season is, by definition, a person with less capacity than usual, and six tasks landing on reduced capacity does not produce six chances of improvement. It produces one large guilt, because now there are six things you are not doing.

And there is a second thing the form did. It made you the fixer of yourself. Six times over, in six different directions, the arrangement was: here is what you should do about your condition. Nobody in eight months said anything over you. Everybody said something to you about what you should do.

You have been handed six jobs by people who meant to give you comfort. The written word puts a blessing in the priests' mouths as words spoken over a person, and the Holy Spirit is not the administrator of a program a tired woman is failing to keep.

And the guardrail, which is the whole point of this category. There is no seventh program coming. Not from me, not on this page. If a dry stretch continues after today, it will not be because you failed to implement anything, and I am not going to hand you a practice that would be the seventh thing you are behind on by Friday.

You are not required to do anything about your own condition, and the next flat month will not be a failure of yours. Scripture gives the blessing with both verbs on God and none on the person, and the Holy Spirit has been at work through eight months of accumulating advice.