If you could see what the person in front of you is carrying, it would probably change the way you talk to them.
The barista making your coffee might be three days into a diagnosis nobody in their life knows about yet. The guy who cut you off in traffic might be driving to a conversation he’s been dreading for weeks. The coworker who seems distracted might be watching their marriage quietly come apart. We move through our days surrounded by people who are navigating something hard, and most of the time, we have no idea.
And if we’re honest, a lot of the time, we’re one of those people too.
I think most of us are sitting with questions we can’t fully answer right now. About our health, our kids, our finances, our faith, our future. Things we’ve prayed about that still feel unresolved. Situations where we genuinely don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And there’s a temptation, when we’re in that kind of fog, to go quiet. To pull back. To tell ourselves that once we get some clarity, once we feel more settled, once we have something figured out, then we’ll re-engage. Then we’ll show up for the people around us.
But I’ve been thinking about how often in Scripture, people were called to bless others in the middle of their own unsettled stories.
Abraham left for a land he couldn’t see yet. He didn’t have a map or a clear destination. And yet the call on his life wasn’t to wait until things were certain. It was to go, and in going, to be a blessing. "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you...and you will be a blessing." (Genesis 12:2) The blessing wasn’t the reward for figuring it out. It was the assignment for the journey.
There is something deeply wise about that. Not the wisdom of having all the answers, but the wisdom of knowing that you don’t need them to still do good. You don’t need resolution to be kind. You don’t need clarity to be generous. You don’t need your own questions answered before you can sit with someone else in theirs.
In fact, sometimes the people who bless us most aren’t the ones who had everything together. They’re the ones who showed up anyway. Who listened well while carrying their own weight. Who chose to give something out of their own scarcity rather than waiting for abundance.
I don’t want to minimize the real weight of hard seasons. Some of what people are carrying right now is genuinely heavy, and it deserves to be named as such. But I also think there is something that happens in us when we choose to bless others in the middle of our own difficulty. It doesn’t fix what’s broken. It doesn’t answer what’s unresolved. But it does remind us that we are still part of something larger than our own struggle. And that matters more than we realize.
You don’t have to have it figured out to be a blessing to the person in front of you today.
peace,
Nick
The barista making your coffee might be three days into a diagnosis nobody in their life knows about yet. The guy who cut you off in traffic might be driving to a conversation he’s been dreading for weeks. The coworker who seems distracted might be watching their marriage quietly come apart. We move through our days surrounded by people who are navigating something hard, and most of the time, we have no idea.
And if we’re honest, a lot of the time, we’re one of those people too.
I think most of us are sitting with questions we can’t fully answer right now. About our health, our kids, our finances, our faith, our future. Things we’ve prayed about that still feel unresolved. Situations where we genuinely don’t know how it’s going to turn out. And there’s a temptation, when we’re in that kind of fog, to go quiet. To pull back. To tell ourselves that once we get some clarity, once we feel more settled, once we have something figured out, then we’ll re-engage. Then we’ll show up for the people around us.
But I’ve been thinking about how often in Scripture, people were called to bless others in the middle of their own unsettled stories.
Abraham left for a land he couldn’t see yet. He didn’t have a map or a clear destination. And yet the call on his life wasn’t to wait until things were certain. It was to go, and in going, to be a blessing. "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you...and you will be a blessing." (Genesis 12:2) The blessing wasn’t the reward for figuring it out. It was the assignment for the journey.
There is something deeply wise about that. Not the wisdom of having all the answers, but the wisdom of knowing that you don’t need them to still do good. You don’t need resolution to be kind. You don’t need clarity to be generous. You don’t need your own questions answered before you can sit with someone else in theirs.
In fact, sometimes the people who bless us most aren’t the ones who had everything together. They’re the ones who showed up anyway. Who listened well while carrying their own weight. Who chose to give something out of their own scarcity rather than waiting for abundance.
I don’t want to minimize the real weight of hard seasons. Some of what people are carrying right now is genuinely heavy, and it deserves to be named as such. But I also think there is something that happens in us when we choose to bless others in the middle of our own difficulty. It doesn’t fix what’s broken. It doesn’t answer what’s unresolved. But it does remind us that we are still part of something larger than our own struggle. And that matters more than we realize.
You don’t have to have it figured out to be a blessing to the person in front of you today.
peace,
Nick