The Tote Bag and the Letter

The bag was a present and that is why it is still in use.

Canvas, good handles, and across the front in a curly font: TOO BLESSED TO BE STRESSED. Her sister gave it to her at Christmas the year before last and thought it was funny and it was, then.

She is standing at the stop with it over one shoulder and the shopping in it, and the letter is in her coat pocket. She has read the letter four times. She knew what it said the first time. She has read it three more times looking for a sentence that is not in it, which is a thing people do and which never once works.

The bus is late. There is a woman further down the shelter on the phone being cheerful with somebody about a delivery.

She has started, this week, to feel that the bag is taking the mickey out of her. Which is a ridiculous thing to feel about canvas. She knows it is ridiculous. She has caught herself turning it round on her shoulder so the writing faces her hip, and she thinks that might be the saddest thing she has done this year, and she has done a few.

Too blessed to be stressed.

She is stressed. She is extremely stressed, in a specific, itemized way that she could set out for you in about four minutes with dates. And she has been told her whole adult life that the word on the bag is true about her, and she has never once been able to work out how both things can be in the same coat.

If you have ever turned something round so it stopped facing you, you know exactly what that is. And you know the thought underneath it, the one that arrives at the bus stop and will not leave: one of those two is a lie, the bag or the letter, and the letter has a date on it.

The word and the slogan are not related

Right. Let me set the two of them side by side and take one of them apart, because you deserve to know which one has been lying to you.

The slogan says: if you are blessed enough you will not feel this. That is the deal on the canvas. Blessedness is a quantity, stress is what happens when you run low, and a woman with a letter in her pocket is therefore a woman running low.

That is not Christianity. That is not even close. Whoever wrote that font was doing a nice thing at a market stall and had no idea it would end up doing this to somebody at a bus stop.

So here is what the word actually means, and I am giving you Paul's version, because Paul quotes David on it and neither of them is talking about a mood.

Even as David also describeth the blessedness of the man, unto whom God imputeth righteousness without works, saying, Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man to whom the Lord will not impute sin.Romans 4:6-8

Impute is an accounting word. It means to put something on somebody's account, to reckon it against them. And Paul says the blessed person is the one against whose account God has decided not to put the thing.

That is the whole definition, and there is nothing in it about stress. It is not a temperature. It is not a mood you should have reached by now. It is a decision made about you, in a place you have never been, about a ledger you did not keep.

So the word means this. Blessed is God's favor resting on a person, and here specifically it is His face turned toward somebody whose account is clear. You are a person against whom God is not reckoning anything, this afternoon, in this shelter, with that letter in your pocket. Romans 4 says the Lord will not impute sin, which is a finished decision rather than a rising feeling, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a legal word out of a courtroom and settles it in a woman's chest at a bus stop.

Two words got the same spelling. One means favored and reckoned clear. The other means visibly relaxed. Your bag is selling the second one.

Where Paul goes looking for a blessed man

Now watch who Paul picks to prove the point, because it tells you everything about the kind of person the word is for.

He picks Abraham, who did not have a child at an age where the whole subject was closed and had spent about twenty five years being told otherwise. And he picks David. David, in the psalm Paul is quoting, is a man writing about a period where he says his bones wasted away and he groaned all day long. That is who is describing blessedness in that passage. A man with a wrecked year and a bad conscience.

Paul does not go and find a comfortable man to make his point. He goes and finds two men at the worst end of it and says: look, that is what blessed means, that right there.

You are exactly the kind of person Paul reaches for to explain the word, and you have been assuming you were the exception to it. Romans 4 builds the whole argument out of a childless man and a man with a groaning year, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a person who has counted herself out and puts her name back inside the example.

And here is what that does to your bus stop. It means the letter in your pocket and the word on the bag are not competing, because they are about two completely different ledgers. The letter is about money or housing or an appointment or a decision that somebody else has made about your life. The word is about what God is reckoning against you, and the answer to that is nothing.

They are not even in the same building.

You have two true things in one coat, and neither one of them has to become a lie for the other to stand. The written word settles the account without ever mentioning the circumstances, and His Spirit is the one who can hold a person steady enough to carry both.

About the stress

Now let me say something plainly about the stress itself, because the slogan has done damage there and somebody has to undo it.

Being stressed is not a spiritual failure. It is a body doing exactly what a body is built to do when a letter arrives with a date on it. Your shoulders are up because there is a real thing coming and your body is preparing for it. That is not unbelief. That is design.

Nowhere in Scripture does anybody get told off for having a hard week in their nervous system. David groans all day long in the psalm that Paul then uses to define blessedness. Both are in the same man at the same time and the Bible has no difficulty with it whatsoever.

You are not disqualified by how the week is landing in your body, and you never have been. Scripture places the blessedness on the reckoning and never on the composure, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Comforter precisely because the people He is given to are not, on their own, comfortable.

I do not know what that letter turns into. I am not going to guess, and I am not going to tell you it comes good, because I have no idea and a woman who has read something four times does not need somebody else's optimism in her pocket too. What is written is what God has reckoned, and that is settled.

One more thing. If that letter is the kind that has you frightened, or if it touches somewhere you cannot see a way through, tell one person who can actually act, today, out loud. A friend, an adviser, a doctor. That is not a lack of faith. That is what a person carrying a heavy envelope should do, and it is entirely compatible with everything above.