The Blessing She Carried for Forty Years

Every Sunday morning for thirty-one years, Pastor Ruth Gonzalez stood at the doors of Grace Community Church in Amarillo, Texas, and spoke the same parting words to every person who walked out: "The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make His face shine upon you." She cupped their hands in hers when she said it. She looked them in the eye.

Most people smiled and moved on to lunch. But Maria Sandoval never forgot.

Maria was nineteen the first time she heard Pastor Ruth say those words over her — broke, pregnant, terrified, slipping into the back pew hoping nobody would notice. She almost made it out the door undetected. But Ruth caught her hands and spoke the blessing like she meant every syllable.

"Nobody had ever asked God to shine on me before," Maria told a reporter forty years later, now directing a network of crisis pregnancy centers across the Texas Panhandle. "I didn't even know God had a face that could turn toward someone like me."

That is exactly what the Almighty intended in Numbers 6. He gave Aaron specific words — not a suggestion, not a sentiment, but a pronouncement — and then made an extraordinary promise: "They will put my name on the Israelites, and I will bless them." The blessing was not a wish. It was a deposit. God attached His own name to His people and backed it with His presence.

Every spoken blessing that carries the name of the Lord is a door God Himself walks through.