Flour on Both Our Hands

The dough is at the stage where it stops being sticky and starts being alive, and her hands know it before she does. Heel of the palm forward. Fold it back. Quarter turn. Her mother's hands did exactly this on exactly this table, and her mother's mother on some other table in some other kitchen she has only seen in one photograph, and the child standing on the chair beside her is doing a wobbly, delighted version of it with a lump the size of an orange.

She notices what has come down. The kneading. The way you fold a tea towel in three and never in half. The exact pitch of voice you use when someone has tracked mud into the hall. A quickness with a sharp word that she has spent thirty years trying to slow. All of it arrived through hands and mouths, generation after generation, and none of it was ever announced. It was just there when she reached for it.

And she notices, with flour up to her wrists and the oven ticking as it warms, what did not come down. Nobody in that photograph ever put a hand on a child's head and said something over it. Not one word about God. Not one sentence that started with the LORD and landed on a name. There were rules in her house and there was food in her house, and there was even a kind of love in her house, but there was no blessing in it. She would know. She has been listening for it her whole life.

You know this kitchen. Maybe the child is yours or your sister's or the neighbor's, and maybe it is bread or a bicycle or a school shirt being buttoned. But you have found faith late enough that you can remember not having it, and now you are standing over the next person in your line with something rising in you that you want to say over them, and your mouth is empty. Nothing was handed to you for this. Whatever came down your line, a blessing was not in the parcel. And you are afraid that means you cannot give one.

The blessing did not start with a family

Here is the thing to hold in your floured hands. The first blessing anyone in Scripture stood under, the one every other blessing runs back to, was not passed down. It was handed sideways, from God, to a man whose father's house had nothing of the kind in it.

Abraham came out of a house that served other gods. Joshua says it plainly, near the end of his life, when he stands the whole people up and reminds them where they came from: your fathers lived beyond the River long ago, Terah, the father of Abraham, and they served other gods (Joshua 24:2). That is Abraham's line. Not a blessing in it. Not a word over a head. And then God spoke.

I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing.Genesis 12:2

Read the grammar of that. I will bless you. God said it, first, to a man with nothing behind him but a father who prayed to something else. The blessing on Abraham did not come from Terah. It came from the mouth of God, and it landed on one man, and from that one man it went forward through hands laid on heads for the rest of the book.

So hear this, and hear it as already true and not as a hope: you have a blessing on you that did not come through your family, because it came the way Abraham's did. Paul writes that those who are of faith are blessed along with Abraham, the man of faith (Galatians 3:9). That is not my thought about you. That is the written word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it land on a person rather than stay on a page. You are of faith. So you are blessed with him.

What was absent, and what has been put there

Notice what this article is not doing. It is not putting your family on trial. Your mother's mother did the best she could with what was in her hands, and she handed you the bread and the tea towel and probably a great deal more, and nobody in this kitchen is going to speak a word against her. What was missing was simply missing. There is no need to name it as anything worse than that. Scripture does not go back and prosecute Terah. It goes forward and blesses Abraham.

That is the whole shape of it. Not undoing. Giving. What you did not inherit, you have been given, and it is yours right now as you stand at that table. Paul says it a few lines further on: in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham has come to the nations, so that we might receive the promised Spirit through faith (Galatians 3:14). The blessing came. The Spirit was promised and the Spirit was given, and it is His Spirit in you, and not a pedigree, that makes you a person under blessing.

That means something practical for the child on the chair. You are not the last link in a line that never had it. You are the first link in a line that does. Abraham had no blessed ancestor either. He had God, and a word, and then he had Isaac, and Isaac had Jacob, and old blind Jacob had two grandsons brought to his bed.

Hands on heads

Go and read that scene sometime, because it is the picture for this room. Joseph brings his two boys to their grandfather. Jacob is nearly gone, his eyes are dim, and he reaches out and puts his hands on the heads of the boys and speaks a blessing over them, crossing his hands to do it, and it is such a physical thing that Joseph tries to move his father's hand to the other head and Jacob will not let him (Genesis 48:14 to 19). Hands. Heads. Words. A grandfather doing over his grandchildren the thing that had been done over him.

But look at where that line started. Two generations before, it started with a man whose father had never done any such thing over him at all. Somebody was first. Somebody stood in a blessing that had not been in their house, and put their hands on the next head, and after that it was in the house.

You are that somebody, and you are already standing in the blessing you are about to hand on. I want to anchor that hard, because it is not sentiment. Peter says on the day the Spirit came that the promise is for you and for your children and for all who are far off, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself (Acts 2:39). Far off. That is a person from a line that did not have it. And the promised Spirit is what makes a promise a possession instead of an idea, so it is not your hands that carry the blessing forward, it is His Spirit through your hands. Your hands only need to be willing to be laid on a head.