Why Jesus sometimes plays a very long game

We closed the last page of a gruesome, thrilling picture book called The Day Louis Got Eaten and said our prayers. Our prayers are always the same. We ask Jesus to bless as many people known to us as we can remember, taking it in turns to name them. We aren’t sure what the range of consequences might be for someone if we ask Jesus to bless them, but we do it anyway, and the word has a pleasant, incantatory feel to it when repeated.

It has been at least a fortnight since we last asked Jesus to bless our list because Grandad has been away. And as we went through the regulars, it occurred to us that a lot had happened to some of these names since we last asked Jesus to bless them, some of it, on the face of it, not so good. We can only conclude that when he decides to bless people, Jesus sometimes has to play a long game, and in some cases a very long game indeed.

Take his grandma — my boy’s mother — as an example. For as long as we can remember we have asked Jesus to bless her, but with no observable results. For about 20 years she has lived according to the dictates of a cluster of strange neuroses, chief among which is agoraphobia, and in all that time she has ventured no further from home than the garden gate. I tell a lie. Twice, a social worker has coaxed her out through the garden gate and along the road as far as the pillar box at the end of the street, raising hopes that she might then be coaxed by painstaking increments as far as the shops, or even be cured.