Every Day I Will Bless You

He is not a man who has drifted. That is what makes this hard to name.

Ask him if he believes and the answer is immediate and unembarrassed. Ask him if he prays and the answer is yes, and it is true. He has prayed with real desperation four or five times in his adult life and every one of those was a genuine transaction between a man and God, and he could tell you where he was standing for each of them.

The hospital corridor in the second year of the marriage. The night the business nearly went. The morning after his brother's accident, on a floor, for about two hours. And a Tuesday nobody knows about, in a car, in 2019.

Those are real. Nobody could take them off him.

The problem is the other eleven thousand days.

On a day when nothing is wrong he does not speak to God at all. Not out of rebellion. There is simply nothing to say, because the whole shape of the relationship, as it has built itself over thirty years, is that God is who you go to when the roof comes off, and when the roof is on you get on with the day.

He noticed it properly last spring, at a table in a courtyard with tea going cold, and the noticing came with a small cold feeling he did not enjoy: that he knows God the way you know a man who once pulled you out of a river.

Which is a real kind of knowing. And it is not friendship.

The psalm that decides in advance

There is a line in the psalms that is not a feeling. It is a decision, made ahead of time, about ordinary days.

Every day will I bless thee; and I will praise thy name for ever and ever (Psalm 145:2).

Every day. Not on the days it occurs to me. Not on the days there is something to report. Every day, which necessarily includes the enormous number of days when nothing whatsoever is happening, and those are the days this article is about, because those are the eleven thousand you have lost.

You have been given ordinary days as the place where a relationship actually gets built. The word says His mercies are new every morning (Lamentations 3:23), and every morning includes the completely uneventful ones, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an unremarkable Tuesday into a place where a man meets God rather than merely gets through.

Emergency knowing is real knowing, and it is not enough on its own

I want to honor the four or five, because a lesser article would treat them as a failure and they are not.

Those prayers were real. God met you in that corridor. Nothing about this message says the desperate ones did not count, and I would go further: some of the deepest things a man ever learns about God he learns on a floor at four in the morning, and you have that, and a great many comfortable people do not.

But here is the shape of the problem, and you already felt it at the table with the tea going cold.

A man you only ever meet in a crisis is a rescuer. A man you also meet on a Thursday is a friend. And you have thirty years of rescue and almost no Thursdays, and so what you know about God is entirely true and almost entirely about His power, and very little of it is about His company.

You are not a case He handles; you are a man He keeps company with. Scripture says Abraham was called the friend of God (James 2:23), and friendship is a category the book uses on purpose, and the Holy Spirit is called the Comforter, which is a word about presence rather than about emergency response.

What blessing God does to the one doing it

Now, the thing about a berakhah, a spoken blessing turned toward God, is that it does not inform Him.

He does not need to be told what He has done. The sentence is not for His records. What it does is turn the head of the person saying it, out loud, in a courtyard, for about four seconds, and a head that has been turned even briefly walks into the rest of the day at a slightly different angle.

That is why the psalm makes it daily. Not because God requires a daily report. Because a man requires a daily turn.

You have a mouth that can put you in front of God in one sentence, on any morning, with nothing wrong. The written word says the sacrifice of praise is the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His name (Hebrews 13:15), which places it in the mouth rather than in the mood, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a spoken sentence more than a noise in a courtyard.

And let me be plain, because this site does not sell a technique. Doing this every morning does not buy you an easier year and nothing here suggests the next crisis is canceled. What is settled is that a man who speaks to God on the days nothing is wrong knows Him differently by the time something is, and that is not a strategy, it is simply what happens between people who talk.