He Lifted His Hands and Blessed Them

He is good at arriving and he has nothing at all for leaving.

At a door, at the end of an evening, with his coat half on, he becomes a man with no vocabulary. Right. Well. Better be off. Thanks. And then he is out, and the door is shut, and the whole thing takes four seconds and has nothing in it.

It is not coldness. He is a warm man in the middle of an evening; he is the one who asks the follow-up question, the one who notices the person on the edge of the group. It is specifically the leaving that is empty.

He worked out why at his uncle's funeral, standing in a car park, watching his cousins do exactly the same thing to each other.

Nobody in his family has ever said anything on the way out. Not a bad thing; nothing at all. His father used to leave the house in the morning by putting his hand flat on the door frame twice, which every one of his children noticed and none of them ever asked about, and that was the whole of the ceremony in that house.

So he has arrived at forty-nine with a rich middle and two empty ends, and he has children now who leave rooms exactly the way he does, and he watched his eldest do it in November and felt something go through him that he has not been able to put down since.

The last thing He did with His hands

And he led them out as far as to Bethany, and he lifted up his hands, and blessed them. And it came to pass, while he blessed them, he was parted from them (Luke 24:50 and 51).

Read what happens in what order, because it is a departure and it is the most instructive one in the book.

He leads them out. He lifts His hands. He blesses them. And while He is blessing them, He goes.

That is what Jesus did with the last few seconds He had in the room. Not a final instruction. Not a summary. Not a warning about what to watch for. He put His hands up and spoke good over them, and He was still doing it when He left, which means the last thing those men saw was a blessing in progress.

You are permitted to make a departure into a blessing rather than into a gap. That is what the text records, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old departure into a working pattern for a man in a hallway, because Scripture says we have the mind of Christ, which is a claim about being able to do things the way He did them.

An empty end is a learned form

Now let me say the kind thing, because you have started to be hard on yourself since November and there is no need for it.

You did not choose this. Nobody in your family did. A form of leaving gets transmitted by being watched, and you watched a man put his hand on a door frame twice for eighteen years and never once asked why, and that was your whole education in departures.

That is not neglect. It is a house where the ends of things were not spoken, probably because nobody had the words and nobody knew they were missing.

And the reason it matters is not that four seconds at a door is a large thing in itself. It is that endings are where people put weight. Everybody remembers how something ended. A hallway is a disproportionately important four seconds and nobody in your family has ever known it.

You are able to fill an end that was empty in your family for generations. The word says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks (Matthew 12:34), and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills a heart, which means the words for this do not have to be manufactured by a man standing in a hallway with his coat half on.

Short, and out loud, and with a hand up

Here is the practical shape, and it is smaller than what you are dreading.

Jesus did not make a speech at Bethany either. He lifted His hands, which is a physical thing anybody can do, and He spoke good over them.

So: a hand up. Not both, unless it is your own children, in which case both. And one sentence out loud that is good and specific and about them.

It takes about five seconds and it is completely unmistakable, and your children will absorb it the way you absorbed the door frame, which is to say completely, silently, and without ever asking about it.

You are handing on a form and it takes five seconds at a door. Scripture shows the departure being spent on a blessing rather than on an instruction, and it is the Holy Spirit who lands a spoken word on the people it is said over, so the effectiveness of this was never a question of a man's eloquence in a hallway.

And I will be honest, because you would want me to be. Doing this does not change what your family did or repair the four seconds you have spent forty-nine years leaving empty. And it will feel enormous the first time and look like nothing from the outside. What is settled is what Jesus did with His last few seconds in a room, and a man can copy that in his own hallway on Thursday.