Here, There, and Everywhere

The Remarkable Ordinary #26: JL Gerhardt on Receiving Blessing Across the World

My family is being prayed over. Two elders huddle around us, hands on our shoulders. My husband smiles, I cry a little, and our daughters, 12 and 13, nod and amen. They seem entirely comfortable (even as we all strain to understand the words, carpeted as they are in the thick shag of a Northern Irish accent). We have never met these men. This is only our third Sunday sitting in the back row of this Belfast church. But here we are, being sent off to a new city with prayer and blessing.

It should be strange.

But we’ve been here before.

For eleven years my husband and I worked as ministers at a church outside Austin, TX, blessing people left and right. We blessed new babies. We blessed engaged couples. There were blessings for new staff members, for long-serving volunteers, for children before Bible class, for new deacons, for new members and moving members, for retirees, for students at the start of a school year. We blessed collected cans of beans and stacks of jars of peanut butter. We blessed backpacks for area kids and Bibles sent to the border.

Because of my role I often stood on stage, my hands placed on an arm, a shoulder, or a back, closing the circuit so the grace of God might flow from person to person. From the pews, the congregation would lift extended arms like superheroes hurling power, like holy witches casting spells.

At home with our children before sleep, my husband and I once again donned priestly robes, blessing our girls, our hands on their little bodies in their little beds: The Lord bless you and keep you…

We don’t actually wear robes. We aren’t those kinds of priests. Just the common kind. Like Adam and Eve. Like all those people in our church in the pews — we‘re a priesthood of believers. To my family “priesting” has partly meant blessing everything we can get our hands on.

We left our church in December of 2020 to move abroad and devote ourselves fully to the holy work of telling stories. Covid restrictions were still in place but the church blessed us anyway. We all wore masks. We kept our distance. But there were prayers and kindnesses, goodbye cookies and smiling eyes, and somehow, with so much wrong in the world, and so much wrong in our hearts (leaving hurts), everything was also right.

That’s the power of a blessing.

The best way I know to explain a blessing is that it’s the opposite of a curse. It’s speaking words of life (not death), hope (not despair), light (not darkness) and victory (not defeat) over a person set apart by God to receive those very things. It’s a kind of echo of the first holy words — Let there be...

Blessings create and order, direct and delineate. Blessings remind us who we are. Blessings remind us of what God’s promised. Blessings remind us that we walk through the world seen, loved, and protected. Being blessed is a little like being handed a map and a little like drinking a glass of cold water and a little like being defibrillated.

The first place we moved after leaving Texas was Weymouth, England. Weymouth is a port town on the south coast of Dorset. When we arrived, England was still in the thick of a country-wide lockdown, but soon enough restrictions eased and we found an open church. We met the priest (the kind who wears official robes), and she invited us to take a walk with her on the beach. Later we’d invite her over for dinner on the patio. And then she’d invite us over for gin and tonics. At the end of our time in Weymouth, Jo, the priest, invited us up to the altar and prayed a prayer of blessing over our family. It was our very first blessing from a person with a collar, but it felt the same as all the blessings before — it felt like being in the presence of God.

After Weymouth we traveled a bit for work, hosting parenting workshops at churches across the states. Unexpectedly, everywhere we went, people blessed us.

Our next stop was Belfast, Ireland. We attended a post-Presbyterian church there for all of three weeks, and on our last Sunday, the elders found us, told us they’d heard we were “leaving” and asked if they could pray.

Then we spent a month in Croatia. We visited a multi-denominational church that met in the woods. They heard we were traveling Christian storytellers and asked if we wouldn’t mind saying something and if they might bless us.

Soon we were packing up to head to Ireland-County Donegal this time. We found a church online and drove 45 minutes into Londonderry. We walked in and found home. These days, we go back to Derry every other year, because we love it there and because we’re loved there. But the first time we went we only stayed for six weeks. Our girls attended youth group gatherings on Friday nights. At their final one, the group gave them gifts and cards. They ate cake and took pictures, and afterward, you guessed it, gathered around our girls to bless them. We have a picture of our little tweens surrounded in love by twenty should-be strangers.

Two days later the whole church blessed the Gerhardts and sent us on our way.

We moved to South Africa next. We lived there for five months. We found a community church to attend our first Sunday in town. We met the preacher, went over to his house for dinner, and said “sure” when he texted and asked if we’d man the welcome table next week. I struggled to pronounce Afrikaans and Zulu and Xhosa names, but everyone made me feel like I belonged (despite my ridiculous accent). Within two weeks we were leading a small group in our Airbnb. And on our last Sunday we were called up on stage and blessed.

It wasn’t until that last blessing in the last of our borrowed, temporary homes abroad, that we realized — We have been blessed everywhere we’ve been.

In Austin, Weymouth, Omaha, Belfast, Samobor, Londonderry, and Cape Town, we found ourselves held, protected, seen, and commissioned, given a cup of cold water, a map, belonging, power, and the very presence of God.

Our eldest daughter leaves home this year. She’s joining the Coast Guard in the fall. People ask me if I’m nervous for her, and the answer is mostly no. For two reasons: 1. Because she’s been blessed (again and again and again). She carries the power of the presence of God, given to her by His church. And 2. Because the blessing of the family of God is everywhere, and if she ever runs out, she knows where to go.

Thanks so much to

JL Gerhardt

for sharing this incredibly cool and inspiring story. If you haven’t yet, please check out her publication The Goodness / from JL Gerhardt

The Remarkable Ordinary is a weekly publication highlighting Christians performing ordinary acts of kindness, hospitality, and integrity. Its goal is to be an anti-moral failure, anti-church scandal, anti-hypocrisy kind of journalism.

For more info on the “why” behind The Remarkable Ordinary, check out this essay.

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