Grace At A Table Nobody Can Say

He has said grace at that table for twenty two years.

The same twelve words. He inherited them from his own father, who said them fast and slightly wrong, and he says them the same way, fast and slightly wrong, because that is how they go.

Twenty two years. Through the year the roof leaked, and the year his brother did not speak to them, and the two years with the double buggy jammed against the dresser, and the Christmas with fourteen people and a card table joined onto the end. The plates go down, everybody stops, he says the twelve words, and they start.

Since March, he cannot.

The first time he thought he was tired. He got about four words in and there was nothing behind the fifth one, and he coughed and said amen and everybody started eating and nobody said anything at all, which was worse.

The second time he did not get past the first word.

Now it is June and here is what he has arranged, without ever deciding to. He eats standing up at the counter before they sit down. He is out at the yard when they eat. He takes his plate through and says there is a thing he needs to look at. In eleven weeks he has sat down at his own table with his family maybe four times, and none of them at the beginning of a meal.

Nobody has mentioned it. That is his family all over.

Tonight there is a stew and it is a Friday and he is at the counter with his coat still on, and his daughter, who is sixteen and misses nothing, is holding the serving spoon and looking at him across the room.

And she says: Dad, do you want me to say it?

The oldest hard table words in the world

Let me stand at the counter with you for a minute, because I know what that question sounded like and I know it did not sound like kindness.

It sounded like the end of something.

So I want to put a Scripture in your hand before you answer her, and it is one you already know, which is exactly the point.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.Psalm 23:1

Now think about where you have heard that, and who has been carrying it there. The Spirit of God has kept those six words in the mouths of frightened, ordinary people for three thousand years.

At gravesides. In hospital corridors. Said by people who could not have constructed one original sentence about God on the day they said it. It is the most borrowed set of words in the English language, and it has been said over more hard tables than any other text in existence, and nobody in the whole history of the church has ever once suggested that a person saying it was not really praying.

It is a shepherd's psalm, and here is what a shepherd does in the fourth verse. He walks a valley with somebody. Not around it. Through it, at the pace of the one who cannot go faster.

Hear me now, because you have been standing at that counter with your coat on for eleven weeks. You are not a man whose leadership has failed. The written word hands the whole church a text for exactly the season where nothing of your own will come, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that psalm in the mouths of ordinary people for three thousand years for the sake of nights like this one.

Now let us look at what actually happened in March, because you have been calling it a collapse.

You could not say twelve words that mean thank You for what is in front of us, in a season when what is in front of you is not what you asked for. That is not a failure of faith. That is a man too honest to say a sentence he cannot yet mean, and I would rather have that man at the head of a table than a man who can say anything.

Your father said those twelve words fast and slightly wrong. Your father was not a man of enormous words either. What he did was make sure something got said, every night, at the start, whether or not he was up to it, and that is the whole of the tradition you actually inherited. The words are not the tradition. The something getting said is the tradition.

So the question your daughter just asked is not the end of your leadership. It is the first time in eleven weeks that somebody in that room has been given a way to do what you built the room to do.

Hear this plainly. You have not lost your place at the head of that table. Scripture puts the Shepherd's psalm in the hands of the whole flock precisely so that when one of them cannot walk, the others carry the words, and the Spirit of God is not divided about which mouth they come out of. What is written is that He restores the soul. It does not say the soul restores itself, and it does not say the head of the house has to do the restoring on his own.

And one more thing, because it is the piece that gets a man to the chair.

Eating standing up at the counter has not protected them. They know. Sixteen year olds always know. What they have been watching for eleven weeks is not a father who cannot pray. It is a father who has stopped sitting down with them, and that is a different loss and a bigger one, and it can be over tonight.