The Word Under the Cape

The stylist has known her for years, and the stylist is a believer, and the stylist says it with the scissors in one hand and the comb in the other, brightly, meaning it: "Three kids! You are so blessed."

It is Thursday afternoon. The dryers are going. The woman under the dryer by the window is reading a magazine and the girl at the basin is singing along to the radio very slightly out of tune. It is a lovely salon. It smells of that particular warm smell salons have. And she is sitting under the cape with her hair wet and combed flat and her face, without the hair round it, looking exactly as tired as it is, and the stylist has just said the word.

Blessed.

She looks at the woman in the mirror. She actually looks, the way you do not usually let yourself look in a salon mirror, and she tries to see what the word is supposed to be describing. The woman in the mirror's husband is gone. Not dead, gone, which people find harder to say sorry about. The woman in the mirror's middle boy has not answered a message in eleven weeks and she has stopped counting the messages because the number was starting to feel like an accusation. The woman in the mirror's mother is in a home now and does not always know her. That is the woman under the cape. And somebody who loves her, who is doing nothing but being kind, has just called her blessed with a comb in her hand.

She says thank you. She smiles at the mirror. And she goes on sitting there with a word on her that does not fit anything she can see.

You have been handed that word. Somebody meant it well, or a whole room sang it, or you read it on a mug, and you looked at your actual life, the one with the gone husband or the silent son or the mother who does not know you, and the word sat on top of it like a hat that belongs to somebody else. And underneath the politeness there is a small hard question you have never said out loud: if that is what blessed means, then whatever I am, I am not it.

The word does not mean what the salon meant

Let me stand behind the chair with you and say the low thing first, because you've been polite about it for long enough. The pain is not that your life is hard. You know your life is hard. The pain is that a good word has been said over it that seems to prove the hardness is your fault, or your lack, or evidence that the favor went to somebody else. Blessed, in the mouth of the salon, means: look at everything you've got. And what the mirror holds is a mirror full of things you cannot fix. So the word lands like a verdict.

So let me give it back to you as it was actually written, because the salon did not invent the word, and neither did the mug.

Blessed is the man who trusts in the Lord, whose trust is the Lord. He is like a tree planted by water, that sends out its roots by the stream, and does not fear when heat comes, for its leaves remain green, and is not anxious in the year of drought, for it does not cease to bear fruit.Jeremiah 17:7-8

Read what is in that verse and read what is not. There is heat in it. There is a year of drought in it. The tree does not get better weather. The word blessed is said over a tree standing in a drought, and the thing that makes it blessed is not the sky. It is where the roots are.

That is the meaning. Blessed is not a description of how a life looks from the salon chair. It is a description of where a person is planted, and whose face is turned toward them, and what their roots are drinking while everything above ground is having a very hard year. Favor resting on a person. Not comfort resting on a life. Those are two different words and the second one was never the one God said.

You are blessed in the life you actually have, right now, under the cape, with nothing in the mirror improved. I am not being kind there. I am reading Jeremiah 17 to you, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a word written to a nation in a hard year and settles it, as a fact and not a compliment, on a woman with wet hair.

Blessed while nothing had changed

Now let me show you the word on somebody, so you can see it fit.

A girl in a hill town, engaged and not yet married, and an angel comes and calls her favored. Highly favored. Blessed among women. And then she is pregnant, and the town knows the dates, and the man she is promised to is working out how to end it quietly, and there is no version of the next nine months that looks, from any window in that town, like anybody's idea of blessed.

And she stands in her cousin's doorway and she says it about herself. All generations will call me blessed. Not because anything had improved. Nothing had improved. She said it because He had looked on her. That was the whole content of the word in her mouth. He looked at me. His face is toward me. That is what blessed is.

You have favor resting on you that was never measured by your circumstances, and it was never once withdrawn when they got hard. That is what is written in Luke 1 over a girl whose life looked, from the outside, like a scandal, and it is His Spirit, the same one who overshadowed her, who is the one telling you the word is yours and not somebody else's hat.

Now, and I am going to say this very carefully because both halves matter. Your hard year is not the absence of favor. And your hard year is not secretly the favor either, dressed up, waiting for you to be grateful for it. Nobody sent you the gone husband to bless you. The drought is a drought. Jeremiah does not pretend it is rain. He simply says that the roots are in the water while it is happening, and that the leaf stays green because of the water and not because of the weather. Both halves. Hold them both.

The roots, not the sky

So what are you drinking, under there, while the year is what it is?

The word says: whose trust is the Lord. Not whose life is going well. Not whose son has answered. Whose trust is the Lord, and who is therefore planted by a stream that the drought does not reach. That is not a technique. It is a location. It is where you already are if you are in Christ, and you did not put yourself there by being strong; you were planted, and He did the planting.

You are planted by water that does not depend on the weather in the mirror. Jeremiah says the roots go out to the stream, and it is His Spirit who is the stream, the living water Jesus promised, running underneath a salon chair on a Thursday whether or not the woman in it can feel wet.

And I want to say what this does not mean, plainly, because this site says it plainly. It does not mean the son is about to answer. It does not mean the husband is coming back. It does not mean the year turns. I have no idea what He is about to do and I would be lying to you if I dressed a guess up as a word. What I know is what is written: the tree in the drought is called blessed, present tense, roots in the water, leaf still green, and that is you, today, in this chair.