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We all know the blessing from Numbers 6: "The Lord bless you and keep you..." But do you know the psychology embedded in the blessing? Listen in as Chris and Beth unpack the genius template for neurobiology encoded in these verses.
Chris and Beth Bruno host conversations at the intersection of psychology and theology. This podcast is powered by ReStory Counseling.
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Want to know what it takes to Restore Your Life? We are Chris and Beth Bruno and we lead a team of brilliant story work counselors around the country all committed to helping you come alive. We call it the Restorey Approach. So if you're a story explorer, kingdom seeker, or just a day-to-dayer, you've come to the right place. Welcome to the Restorey Podcast.
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So as many of you know, Beth and I spent many years overseas and we lived in the Middle East for a good portion of years where we were serving in Christian ministry. And Beth, I remember this one time where we were with our team in this part of the country that had very just ancient, ancient Christian roots in history. And there were caves with mosaics and paintings on the walls and all that.
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to this one area with our staff team one day and we hiked out into this one cave, which is kind of this underground cathedral space. And in that cave, we actually had communion together as a whole team and erupted from our team, which was an international team, which with a common language was the local language of the country, but we were from 12 different.
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countries and all that and what erupted from the team was this moment of worship that just kind of came out and the sounds of the cave, the sounds of the people and all this, it just echoed in such this eerie and beautiful and awe-inspiring way. Do you remember that? Yeah, it was like a, felt like a chant and you know, some of our local staff were
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were actually chanting and it was dark. There was just one small beam of light coming in as we passed a loaf of bread around and one pottery ceramic chalice full of wine. It was so holy. It was brilliant. It was so, so holy. And remembering that, I am aware, and we became more aware through our journey there, through that moment, but then also many other moments like that, of how ancient
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our faith is and how much of who we are as believers is rooted in this ancient history of believers across time. And one of the things that would often be chanted in places like that, and is often chanted in other places in English and many other languages, is this blessing that comes from Numbers chapter 6. And it's a very familiar blessing, and a lot of people don't know
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blessing from Aaron, Moses and his brother Aaron. And it was this command that God had given to Aaron and Moses to bless the Israelites with. And it's this beautiful phrase or phrasing that comes from this blessing that we now hold as somewhat of a chant, maybe as a benediction. There's many songs about it and all that. But I have found over the course of the last several years of doing this work, this re-story work,
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that our ancient faith actually informs the approach that we have here to our psychology, right? Our theology informs our psychology and not the other way around. And this blessing, as I spent more and more time in this blessing, I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so packed. I'll read it. Numbers chapter six, verse 22. The Lord said to Moses, tell Aaron and his sons, this is how you are to bless the Israelites. Say to them,
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The Lord bless you and keep you. The Lord make his face shine on you and be gracious to you. The Lord turn his face toward you and give you peace. So they will put my name on the Israelites and I will bless them. I'm sure you've heard that blessing in many other forms and places before. And the reality is that it is just full of so much goodness. And over the course of the next several weeks, we wanna unpack
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that blessing to kind of see what God is actually saying in the blessing and how that informs the human experience of what we both need and want and how his face actually changes who we are and how we experience him and other people. So this week, let's start with just the very beginning of that blessing and what it means to have your face.
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So in the blessing, it starts with the Lord bless you and keep you and in you hear in this all of, it talks about his face, may his face shine upon you, turn his face towards you. It's fascinating now with our 21st century science that we can actually see how a child's brain develops in response to a face. And when we have a child who doesn't have
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a lot of exposure to another person's face. There's significant lack or kind of slower maturation or growth of their brain because they don't have a face. And I love even in this blessing that God is talking about, he will give us his face, that there's something about his face that grows something in us that we respond to, that we look for.
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that it's not just about his laws or his decrees or his rules and regulations. It's not even about that. It's far more about this relational field that happens between us and God when we have his face and he has ours. And I love that this is like embedded right here in the scriptures that it's all about the face of God. And I think we all know on
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some ways of spoken place, but in many other ways, an unspoken place, what it feels like to have someone's face or to not have someone's face. And when we don't have someone's face, there's this increasing feeling of like, I am alone. I am unseen. I am unwanted. I am unpursued, whatever that is, that there's something about the face that says when it's turned towards us, when we have someone's face, there's an acknowledgement.
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our value, there's an acknowledgement of our humanity. We are more than just an it in this world, just an object. There's something about us that is worth giving our face to, and God's receiving God's face in that place. So, what does that actually look like? I mean, let's talk about what that looked like for God, the Father, to give His face to His children, the Israelites. Let's talk about
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what that looks like for us to give our face to the people in our life. Yeah. The, the first thing that comes to my mind is we even have this phrase, right? Right. As Christians that I'm going to go seek the face of God, which means I'm going to go look for him. And in some ways we've taken that in a wrong direction to say, I'm going to go see what he has to say about what I should do versus I'm going to go find him for his own sake rather than just, you know,
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his instructions for how I should live my life. What it means for us to have God's face is that it really even starts here in this blessing again, the Lord bless you. There is something about a blessing that is a covering over you, that to bless someone is actually to acknowledge, like I just said, their value and their worth. You are worth something to me. And so for God
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means that they experience something of him, his presence, his, you know, obviously God doesn't have an actual physical face other than in the face of Jesus, but they experience his presence, they experience his love, they experience his delight, they experience something of their awareness of his surrounding them and being with them in the midst of their journey through this life. That's what it means to experience
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God's face and in the same way, as I just said, like babies are born looking for faces. Babies are born looking for who am I? How can I find myself in reference to and relationship to how the faces around me interact with me? Um, am I delightful? Well let me look for delight on people's face. Uh, am I worthy of being seen? Well let me see if I can catch people's eyes.
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And then, you know, quite the opposite as well, is that when there's an angry face or a disappointed face or a distant face or a blank face, that there's something about, you know, that that we know the experience of this panic begins to rise in us, this distance, this feeling of I'm alone, that is what happens when we don't have someone's face. You started by describing an infant and what a newborn needs and immediately begins to look for.
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but you quickly began to describe the common human experience. No matter the age, no matter the life stage that we're in, you are describing what we all look for and seek. Which it's true. I mean, all throughout our lives, we are looking for someone's face. And when we receive that, whether it's from a friend or a spouse or a parent or child or whatever,
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there's something within us that settles. There's something within us that comes to, Oh, like I know I am well because I am well seen. I am I something in me can rest because I have been found. And, um, I love, you know, Kurt Thompson, I've quoted him a thousand times, but he just, he says that we are all born into this world looking for someone looking for us, that we're looking.
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where is the person who is looking for me? And that's what I'm talking about here in the face. And yeah, it's in infants, and that's how our brains develop. And so much of our world and the unpacking of our experience in childhood is recognizing both where we did not receive the face or we received a blank or violent face, and how then we have come to survive without a face.
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And that's the work I think that we do here at Restoration is this, this helping people unpack where have we not had a face and where has a face been turned against us? And how have we had to survive without that? So psychology and story embedded in the Aaronic blessing of number six. And where are we going to go next? Yeah. So next week I want to spend a little bit more time on that phrase in the blessing where it says the Lord bless you and keep you.
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I wanna unpack a little bit more of what does it mean to be kept and especially in reference to this blessing. Thanks for listening to the Restory podcast today. If you're curious about who we are over at Restoration Counseling, you can find links to learn more in the show notes. And I'll just say we have a lot of good stuff going on. We have a women's and men's Restory trauma intensive coming up in the next few months.
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You can learn more about those and other upcoming things by clicking Upcoming in the menu on our website. And if you're in need of some immediate intervention on a particular topic, one of our many, many courses might be of interest to you. Head over to Restorey Labs to learn more, and that'll be in the show notes too. Have a great weekend, and join us next time as we unpack more of the psychology and the Aaronic blessing.