You Are the One Being Spoken To

She has a habit and she has never once told anybody about it, because it does not look like anything.

Every good word that comes from the front, she forwards.

Not out loud. Inside, and instantly, and with a kind of reflex generosity that she would call humility if she ever examined it, which she does not. The minister says God has plans for you, and something in her says: that will be for Bernice, who has been through it this year. He says you are chosen, and she thinks about the youth leader, who works so hard. He says the LORD bless you and keep you, and there is not even a pause; the words go straight past her and out into the room and land, in her imagination, on the third row, where the people who are properly involved sit.

She is on the back row. She has been on the back row for eleven years. She is there most weeks, she gives what she can, she has made more trays of sandwiches than anybody has counted. And she has never once, not one single time, taken a word from the front and applied it to herself.

If you asked her why, she would not say I am unworthy. She is not dramatic. She would say something much quieter and much harder to argue with.

She would say: well, they mean it generally.

God does not do general

Let me get straight at this, because it is the whole thing.

When God starts a blessing in Scripture, He starts it with a person and a name. Not a category. Not a demographic. He says to Abram: I will bless thee, and make thy name great, and thou shalt be a blessing (Genesis 12:2). Thee. Thy. Thou. One man, standing there, being addressed.

And when the blessing gets handed to the priests to say over a whole nation, God keeps it singular. Every you in the LORD bless you and keep you is one person, one head, one at a time. He could have made it plural. There were two million of them. He did not.

You are the one being spoken to, and you have been for eleven years. That is the text and not my enthusiasm, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a word from a mouth in a building to a specific woman in a specific chair, which means every one of those words you forwarded to Bernice was addressed to you as well and got there whether or not you signed for it.

The forwarding is not humility. It is a wall.

Now I am going to say something plainly and I am going to say it kindly, because I love the back row and I sat on it for years.

What you call meaning it generally is a wall. It is a beautifully constructed one. It has no arrogance in it at all, which is exactly why nobody has ever challenged it, and which is exactly why it has stood for eleven years.

But look at what it does. It lets you sit under a good word every week and never once be changed by one. It gives you all the exposure and none of the risk. Because if the word was for Bernice, then it not working out in your life proves nothing about you, and you never have to find out whether God meant it about you personally.

That is not humility. Humility receives. What you have been doing is declining, politely, at speed, and calling it something nicer.

You have not been overlooked and you were never on the outside of it. The word says God is no respecter of persons (Acts 10:34), which means He does not have a front row and a back row, and it is His Spirit who has been landing every one of those blessings on your head week after week while you were busy addressing them to somebody else.

And you shall be a blessing

Here is what the forwarding has cost, and it is not what you think.

God said to Abram: I will bless you, and you shall be a blessing. Those two are joined, and the order is not negotiable. A person who never receives has nothing to hand on except effort, and effort runs out, which is roughly what the sandwiches have started to feel like.

You have been given something to carry and not only something to do. Scripture puts the being blessed before the being a blessing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who fills a person up before He sends them out, because God has never once asked anybody to pour from an empty jug.

And I am not going to promise you that receiving this fixes the week. This site does not sell outcomes. Nothing here says the thing you are carrying resolves by Friday. What is settled is that the words from the front have had your name on them the whole time, and a woman who knows that walks into a room differently from a woman who does not.