The Blessing Said Over the Blight

The potato haulms went black in the second week of August, and she left them standing because pulling them meant admitting what was underneath.

It was her first year on the plot. She took it on in March, six weeks after the funeral, because the man at the allotment gate said fresh air and something to dig, and because the house had become a place where the kettle was the only thing that made a sound. So she dug. She put in the potatoes he would have put in, in the rows he would have made, and she talked to him while she did it, quietly, so the couple on plot twelve would not hear.

Then the blight. Then the beans that flowered and never set. Then the September storm that took the shed roof clean off and folded it over the fence like a page. She stood in the wet on the Sunday morning looking at the whole plot at once, the black rows and the bare canes and the shed open to the sky, and the thought arrived without her asking for it: nothing about this year looks like anybody blessed it.

The old man on plot fourteen came down the path with a carrier bag. He is there every day, whatever the weather, in the same brown coat. He held the bag out over the low fence and it was onions, his onions, plaited by the neck, and he said what he says to everybody, in the same voice he uses for the weather. God bless you, love.

And she nearly laughed. Not at him. At the sentence, standing where it was standing, over the black rows and the roofless shed and the grave that was six weeks old when the potatoes went in.

You know that laugh. It is not unbelief. It is the sound a true sentence makes when it hits a year that will not hold it, and the sentence bounces, and you are left holding a bag of somebody else's onions and a blessing that has nowhere to land.

A blessing said in a famine field

Here is what nobody told her, and what nobody may have told you either. The oldest blessings in Scripture were not said over good years. They were said in the middle of bad ones, by people who could see the bad year perfectly well and said the blessing anyway, over it, into it, without waiting for it to improve.

Ruth stood in a barley field that was not hers, in a country that was not hers, picking up what the reapers dropped. Her husband was dead. Her father-in-law was dead. She had walked out of her own land behind a bitter old woman with nothing but a sentence: your people shall be my people, and your God my God. And the famine that had driven Naomi's family out of Bethlehem in the first place had only just lifted. Nothing about her year looked like anybody had blessed it.

And Boaz, the man who owned the field, walked out among his workers, saw the foreign woman bending in the stubble, and blessed her. Right there. Not at the wedding, which had not happened. Not at the harvest supper, which she was not invited to. In the field, in the middle of the morning, with a handful of gleanings in her apron, and the Holy Spirit has kept his words in the book ever since.

The Lord repay you for what you have done, and a full reward be given you by the Lord, the God of Israel, under whose wings you have come to take refuge.Ruth 2:12

Read the last line again, because it is the whole blessing. Under whose wings you have come to take refuge. Boaz did not say your year is secretly good. He did not say the famine was for your growth or the deaths were part of a plan. He said where she was standing. He said whose wings were over her, in the field, in the year as it was.

You are under those same wings tonight, in your year exactly as it is. I am not speaking my own opinion of your year over you. It is written, and the same Holy Spirit who put those words in Boaz's mouth in a barley field is the one who carries them across to your allotment, your kitchen, your ward, your roofless shed. The wings do not wait for the year to change before they cover.

The wing is a corner of a coat

There is one Hebrew word underneath that line worth carrying, and only one. The word for wing there, kanaph, is also the word for the corner of a garment, the edge of a cloak that a person can pull round themselves or spread over somebody smaller. When Ruth later says to Boaz, spread your wing over me, it is that same word, and she means the corner of his coat.

So the blessing is not a bird high up somewhere over the weather. It is a coat pulled round a cold person. It is close, and it is heavy, and it does nothing whatsoever about the weather. The rain still comes. The coat is still on.

Let me name the weight you are carrying, because a blessing said over a wound that has not been named is only noise. This year took something and did not ask. There is a black row in it you cannot pull yet. There is a roof off. There may be a grave under the whole thing, six weeks or six years old, and every kind word people say bounces off the plot because the plot is the evidence and the words are not. You are tired of holding sentences that do not fit, and Scripture does not ask you to pretend the plot looks any better than it does.

And you have been brought under the corner of His coat anyway, before you could make one thing on the plot come right. That is not my reading of your situation; it is what Boaz promised over Ruth in the field, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old blessing in a barley field into a coat on your own shoulders. Nobody has to explain the year for the coat to be on.

What the blessing does not do

I want to be very plain, because I have stood on a burned slope and heard well meaning people explain the fire to me, and I know what that does to a person.

The blessing does not reinterpret the year. Boaz never once told Ruth that the famine was good, or that Mahlon's death was for the best, or that she should be grateful because look where it brought her. Scripture simply does not do that to her. It lets the loss be loss and says a blessing over it in the same breath, and it does not ask her to feel anything about the year in order for the blessing to stand.

So you have permission, from the word itself, to stop trying to make the year good before you receive the blessing. The Spirit of God is not waiting for you to be thankful for the blight. He is not waiting for you to find the lesson in the roof. Ruth 2:12 was spoken over a woman who had found no lesson yet and had not been asked to. It is a blessing on a bad year, not a blessing that turns a bad year good, and there is more mercy in that than in all the explaining in the world.

And here is the part that made her nearly laugh, and it is the part I want you to hear. The old man on plot fourteen said God bless you over the black rows because he could see them. He was not blind. He said it over the blight because he has said it over his own blight for forty years, and he has learned what she was about to learn: that a blessing is not a report on the year. It is a coat put on a person standing in one.

You are blessed, regardless, and the word regardless is doing honest work. Not blessed because. Not blessed when. Blessed under, the way Ruth was under, and the written blessing has stood over famine fields for three thousand years while the Holy Spirit kept it warm. Regardless of the row you cannot pull. Regardless of the roof.