The Blessing Nobody Listens To Any More

He says it at every table and he has said it for nineteen years.

His father said it before him and it went to him at a funeral, in a hallway, without a word being spoken about the handover, which is how these things actually pass.

It takes about eleven seconds.

Here is what the room does while he says it, and he has been noticing it more each year, which is its own sort of problem.

His nephew is fifteen and has a phone under the edge of the table, and does not look up, and has not looked up since about the second year of doing it. Two of the cousins carry on a conversation about a car at approximately half volume, which is meant respectfully and is not respectful. Somebody is still coming back from the kitchen with a bowl. One of the small ones is on a chair, kneeling, being told to sit down properly, and the telling happens during it.

His aunt looks at him. She always does. She is eighty one.

And afterwards there is a general small noise and everybody starts eating and nothing has visibly happened.

Last month, driving home, he said out loud in the car, to nobody: I am the only person in that room who knows what those words mean.

He was tired and it was not entirely true and he regretted it before he was off the ring road. But it has stayed with him, because underneath it was a question he could not shake, and the question is this.

Am I doing a thing, or am I performing the memory of a thing my father did?

Talk of them when thou sittest in thine house

Sit down at the head of that table, because there is an instruction in Deuteronomy that was written for rooms exactly like yours and it says nothing at all about attention.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:7

Talk of them when thou sittest in thine house.

Now notice what is not in that verse. There is no requirement that the house be quiet. There is no instruction to wait until the children are ready, or to check whether anybody is listening, or to stop if they are not.

It is a description of a household with people in it doing ordinary things, and the words going on anyway, in the middle of all of it, at the table and on the road and at both ends of the day.

Hear this with the dish in your hands. You are not performing a memory, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts these words into a busy house without one condition about who is paying attention, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries them into a fifteen year old who is looking at a phone, which is exactly where He does most of His work.

Now let me say something about your nephew, because he is the reason this hurts.

He is not listening. That is true and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

He is also, and this is the thing, learning it. Not the meaning. The shape: that in this family, before anybody eats, a man says a set of words that do not change, and it takes eleven seconds, and it happens whether the room is quiet or not.

He is fifteen and he has heard it perhaps six hundred times. He could not tell you what it means and he could very likely say it if you woke him up.

That is not nothing. That is the whole mechanism, and it is the exact mechanism your father used on you, in a room where you were also not listening, at an age you have conveniently forgotten.

Hear this too. You are not the only one who knows, and Scripture is what says so. What is written puts the teaching in the ordinary traffic of a house rather than in a moment of attention, and the Spirit of God has been in every one of those eleven seconds, and a room that talks through something is not a room that has rejected it.

And now your aunt, who is eighty one and who looks at you every single week.

She is not being polite. She has heard those words in three different houses across sixty years, said by men who are all dead now, and every week she watches the next one say them at a table with children on it.

You think you are the last one holding it. She thinks she is watching it continue. One of you is right, and she has more data, and the written word and the Holy Spirit are both on her side of it.