The Sign She Bought at the Craft Fair

It is on the shelf above the kettle where she put it, and it has been there two years and four months.

A piece of pine about the length of your forearm, sanded at the corners, painted cream, and across it in a nice hand somebody at a stall did with a little brush: BLESSED. There is a sprig of something painted at the end of it. She bought it on a Saturday in a barn conversion with a friend, in a week when things had been looking up, and she remembers being pleased with it in the car.

It leans against the wicker basket. The basket is where the post goes when she does not want to open it, and it is not empty and has not been empty since the spring.

She makes tea underneath that sign every morning. She has not looked at it in a long while, in the way you can stop seeing a thing in your own kitchen. But this morning the kettle took its time and her eye went up and she read it, actually read it, the way you read a word in a language you used to know.

Blessed.

Her husband's hours got cut in March and neither of them says the word money out loud any more, they say "this month", as in, this month is tight, as in, let us see about this month. Her daughter has not been well and nobody can tell her why, and there is another appointment in three weeks that she has already decided not to hope about. Her own mother says things on the phone that she puts down carefully afterwards and does not repeat.

And there is the word, in cream paint, above the kettle, in a nice hand.

She does not take it down. Taking it down would be a statement and she is too tired for a statement. She just stops looking at it again, which is the same thing done quietly.

If you have a version of that sign, and most people do, and it does not have to be wood, it can be a verse in a frame or a phrase on a mug or a thing somebody prayed over you in a good meeting, then you know exactly what she is doing at that kettle. Somewhere under the not looking there is a plain sentence: I paid for that word, and it has not turned out to be about me.

Let me give you the word in plain language

I am going to be plain with you, because plain is what I have and because you have had enough of the other thing.

Here is what happened. Somebody sold you a word without telling you what it meant. Not on purpose. The stall did not know, and the friend did not know, and the person who prayed it over you meant every bit of it. But the meaning that came with the wood was: things are going nicely for her. And when things stopped going nicely the word turned into a small ongoing accusation above your own kettle.

So let us do the plain work. Here is the word as the Bible actually uses it, and I picked this one because the psalm says it about people on a road.

Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them.Psalm 84:5

That is the whole of it. Strength in Him. The road home in the heart. Nothing about the house, nothing about the month, nothing about the hours getting cut.

And if you read on it gets plainer. The next verse has these blessed people walking through a valley of weeping and making a well out of it. The blessing does not skip the valley. It does not shorten the valley. It says: these people, going through that place, are the blessed ones.

So the word means this. Blessed is God's favor sitting on a person. His face turned that way, His strength inside them, His road in their heart. It is not a report on how the house is doing. You have His strength in you this morning, standing at that kettle, and the hours getting cut in March did not draw one drop of it out. Psalm 84 puts the strength in Him and not in the circumstances, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old pilgrim song and lays it on a woman in a kitchen as a present fact rather than a nice idea.

Two words got the same spelling. One of them means favored. The other one means comfortable. You have been reading the wrong one off a piece of pine for two years.

The valley is in the verse

Now I want you to see something in that psalm, because it is the part nobody paints on wood and it is the part you need.

The people in Psalm 84 are on a pilgrimage. They are walking to the house of God and they have to go through a place the psalm calls the valley of Baca, which means weeping. It is a dry place with a name that tells you what people do there. And what the psalm says about them is not that they avoided it, and not that God moved it, and not that they got a shorter route.

It says they go through it and they make it a well.

That is a startling thing to say about people who are having a hard time. Not that they got out early. That water came out of the place where they were crying. And the psalm calls them blessed while they are still in it, still walking, still not home.

You are walking a road God calls blessed while you are still in the hard part of it, and He named it that before you got out. That is the shape of Psalm 84 exactly, blessing spoken over people mid journey, and it is the same Spirit who is called living water in John who makes a well in a dry place rather than a shortcut around it.

I want to be careful here, because this is where people go wrong and it does damage. The psalm does not say the weeping is good. Baca is not a nice place and the psalm does not pretend it is. Nobody is being told to enjoy the valley or to be grateful for it or to describe it as a blessing in disguise. It is a valley with a name that means weeping and God let it keep its name.

What the psalm says is that the people in it are blessed and that water comes up. Both. You have a well in a place you would never have chosen, and having one is not the same as being told the place is fine. Scripture puts the well right there in the valley of weeping, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the drawing up, so the water is not something you have to manufacture on a bad morning.

What to do with the sign

So what about the wood?

I am not going to tell you to take it down and I am not going to tell you to look at it. Both of those are just management. What I would rather do is change what it says without touching the paint.

Because right now that sign says: things are going nicely for her. And it has been saying that above your kettle every morning since March like a small dripping tap. What it can say instead, and what it said all along in the language it was borrowed from, is: God's face is toward this house, and His strength is in the woman who lives here, and the road home is in her heart, and none of that is decided by the basket.

Same six letters. Different word entirely.

You are the person that psalm is describing, not the person the stall was describing, and you were already her before you bought the sign. The written word puts blessing on the one whose strength is in God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves that from a definition you accept to a thing you can stand under at seven in the morning.

And I will not tell you what happens in three weeks at that appointment. I do not know, and a woman who has been sold one word does not need selling another. What I will tell you is what is written, and what is written is where the strength is kept and whose face is turned this way.