Counting on My Fingers at the Men's Breakfast

The tea urn is doing that thing it does. The bacon is under foil. There are eleven men round two tables pushed together and a man at the front who is good at this has said, brightly and with no malice in him at all, "Right. Go round. One thing you are thankful for. One thing God has blessed you with this year."

It has already reached the far end and it is coming back.

The first man says his daughter got in somewhere. The second man says his mother's results. The third man says a job, and everybody makes the sound men make. It goes round like that, easy, quick, warm, and the man on the end at the corner is counting on his fingers under the table because he cannot think of a way to not be counting.

One. He is alive. That is one.

Two. His wife has not left, though they are in separate rooms and have been since April, and he is not certain that counts as a blessing or a delay.

Three.

There is no three. He goes back to one and does it again in case he has missed something. Redundancy in November, which he found out about in a video call with a man from another office who kept apologizing. The spare room since April, which is nobody's fault and is somehow worse for that. His son not ringing, which he understands, because what would you ring about. The car. The tooth he is not getting seen to.

He gets to two and stops.

And it comes round and he says "family", because family is the word you can say that nobody follows up on, and the man beside him claps him on the back and says a good hearty amen, and the urn goes on doing that thing it does, and he sits there in a warm room full of good men feeling like the only person in the county who has been asked to produce something he does not have.

You know that count. You have done it in a circle like that, or in a parking lot afterwards, or on a Sunday night when somebody posted a list. And underneath the two fingers there is a sentence you would not say out loud in that room for anything: if blessed means what they are all saying it means, then whatever the last year did to me, it did it because there was nothing much on me to protect.

You were asked for the wrong list

I want to say the low thing first, because it is the thing under the fingers and nobody in that room could have known to say it.

It is not that your year was hard. You have had hard years and you did not sit there counting. It is that a good word got attached to a list, and when the list came up short the word came up short with it, and that arithmetic runs in one direction only: fewer things, less blessed, and therefore, somewhere down at the bottom where you do not look, less loved.

So let me take the word off the list and put it back where Paul had it, because he wrote the biggest sentence in the New Testament about being blessed and there is not one item on it you could have said at that table.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hath blessed us with all spiritual blessings in heavenly places in Christ.Ephesians 1:3

All. Already. In heavenly places. In Christ.

Read what that verse does not do. It does not survey your circumstances. It does not check the year. It does not ask what came in. It says the blessing has been given, past tense, completely, and it names where it is kept, which is not in your kitchen and not in your bank and not in your spare room. It is kept in Christ, which means the only way to take it off you is to take you out of Him.

That is the meaning of the word. Blessed is the favor of God resting on a person, given in Christ and held in Christ. It is not a tally of what a year handed you. You have every spiritual blessing already, all of them, given and not owed, and a redundancy in November did not reach a single one. Ephesians 1 says hath blessed, which is a finished verb, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Paul calls the seal on it two breaths later, so what holds the blessing in place is God's own guarantee and never your ability to list it.

Two words got the same spelling. Favor resting on a person. Not a good year resting on a life. You have been holding the wrong one and being quietly crushed by it in warm rooms full of kind men.

What Paul was counting when he wrote it

Now hold where that sentence came from, because it matters as much as what it says.

Paul writes Ephesians from custody. He is not at liberty, he is not comfortable, he has no house, no security and no idea what the outcome of his case is, and he calls himself a prisoner of Christ Jesus in his own letter twice. If you had gone round that room in the order it went round and got to Paul and said one thing God has blessed you with this year, the honest answer available to him was a chain and a soldier.

And what comes out of him is the longest, gladdest, most extravagant paragraph about blessing in the whole of the New Testament. Chosen. Adopted. Accepted. Redeemed. Forgiven. Sealed. He is not counting up. He is counting in. He goes through a list of things nobody can repossess and he is drunk on it.

You are chosen and accepted and sealed today, in the spare room, on the bad side of a year, and none of those three is a feeling you have to generate before it is true. Ephesians 1 stacks them one after another as facts about people rather than moods in them, and it is the same Spirit Paul names as the earnest of the inheritance who makes a stated fact into a settled one inside a man.

And notice what Paul never does with his circumstances. He does not spiritualize them. He does not say the chain is secretly a gift. He asks people to pray about the chain. He wants out. He simply refuses to let the chain testify about the Father, because the chain does not have that job and never did.

You have a Father whose face has not moved once this year, and the year has no standing to speak on His behalf. That is exactly what Ephesians 1 does when it puts the blessing in heavenly places rather than earthly ones, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a phrase like heavenly places out of the abstract and settles it on a man at the corner of a table.

The list is not the enemy, the exchange rate is

I am not telling you to stop being thankful. Thankfulness is oxygen and you will want it back. What I am telling you is that a gratitude list is a good practice that was never designed to carry a verdict, and somewhere in the last few years it started carrying one.

Here is the exchange rate that was smuggled in: things are the currency, and blessed is what you can buy with enough of them. Under that rate a man with two fingers up is a poor man in the room. Under Paul's rate there is no currency, because it was all given away at once, to everyone in Christ, before anybody had a year to report on.

So both halves have to be held. Your losses this year are real losses. Redundancy is not a lesson. April is not a gift with a bow on it that you have failed to open. And your losses are not an audit of God's favor either. Both of those are lies, and the second one dresses better.

You are not being measured, and you were not being measured when you sat there counting. Scripture says God has blessed us in Christ, which puts the whole weight on Him and none of it on the tally, and His Spirit is the one who makes that stop being a sentence you agree with and start being a floor you stand on.

What I do not know is what this year does next. I am not going to guess at that, and if a man tells you he knows, walk away from him warmly and quickly. What is written is where the blessing is kept, and it is kept in Christ.