Both Hands on Both Heads

He wants to bless his sons and he does not know what a blessing looks like from the inside.

That is the honest version of it. He has read about it. He has heard a preacher describe a father putting his hands on a child's head and speaking over him, and something in his chest went hot and stayed hot for about two days, and he went home determined.

And then he stood at a bedroom door with a nine-year-old and a six-year-old in it and could not do it.

Because he had no idea what it was supposed to sound like. His own father was not a bad man. He worked, he provided, he was in the house, he was not cruel. He simply never once put his hands on his son's head and said anything, and there is no memory to copy, and a man cannot imitate a thing he has never seen.

So what he had, standing in that doorway, was an intention with no shape, and a fear underneath it that whatever came out of his mouth would sound like a performance, and his nine-year-old would look at him the way nine-year-olds look at a parent doing something new and embarrassing.

He went in and said goodnight in the usual way.

That was fourteen months ago and it has not stopped bothering him.

An old man who was blessed badly blesses well

There is a scene at the end of Genesis where a very old man puts his hands on two boys' heads, and the reason it is worth your evening is what that old man's own history was.

Jacob's own experience of blessing was a mess. He got his through a deception, in a tent, from a father who could not see. Whatever a healthy transmission of blessing looks like, he did not receive one.

And here he is, at the end of his life, doing it properly.

The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads; and let my name be named on them, and the name of my fathers Abraham and Isaac; and let them grow into a multitude in the midst of the earth (Genesis 48:16).

He puts his hands on their heads. He names who God has been to him personally, the one who redeemed him from all evil, which is a sentence with his whole complicated life inside it. He asks for the name to be put on them. He asks for increase.

You are able to give what you never received. That is what that whole scene is, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a spoken blessing land on a child rather than the father's technique, because Scripture says it is the Spirit who gives life and the letter that profits nothing.

You do not need a template. You need a sentence.

Now let me take the fear off you, because it is the actual obstacle and it is not spiritual.

You are afraid it will sound like a performance. That fear is telling you that a blessing has a correct form which you do not know, and that a wrong form will be worse than nothing.

There is no correct form. Look at what Jacob actually says: it is three clauses long, it names God out of his own life, and it asks for two specific things. That is it. It is not liturgical, it is not polished, and it would take about eleven seconds to say.

You have everything you need for this and it is shorter than you think. The word records the blessing itself and it is three lines long, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a father's short sentence to a boy's head, because Scripture says the word does not return void, and a father is not required to supply the power.

Your sons will not remember the wording

Here is the thing that will get you through the doorway, and it is worth having before you go in.

Your nine-year-old will not remember what you said. Almost nobody does. What he will remember, and what he will still have at forty, is that his father put both hands on his head and said something to God about him, and that his father's voice was not quite steady when he did it.

That is the whole payload. The words are the vehicle. The event is the thing.

And the embarrassment you are afraid of is not a risk; it is a certainty, and it is also the exact texture that makes a child remember it, because children remember the moments when a parent did something unguarded far longer than the moments when a parent did something well.

You are handing your sons something that outlives the wording of it. Scripture says the mercy of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting upon them that fear him, and his righteousness unto children's children (Psalm 103:17), and it is the Holy Spirit who runs a thing like that down a line, which is not a work a father can do by getting a sentence right.

And I will be plain, because we do not oversell here. Doing this does not decide what your sons believe at twenty-four. Nothing here promises you an outcome in another person and it never will. What is settled is that you can hand over what you were never handed, tonight, in about eleven seconds, and that the not-having-received is not a disqualification.