The Table Is Not A Debate

He used to love that table. He wants to say that first, because it makes the rest of it worse.

Twelve of them, most Sundays, at his aunt's, since he was a boy. The dishes come out in the same order. There is a chair everybody knows not to sit in. There is a running argument about a football result from 2011 that is now purely ceremonial.

Three times in two years he has wrecked it.

Not by shouting. He has never shouted at that table. He has done something more precise than shouting, which is to answer properly.

Somebody says a thing. It is usually his uncle, and it is usually said sideways, half to the room, in a voice that is doing about four things at once, one of which is fishing. And he sees it. He sees the hook go in the water. He has, on all three occasions, seen it clearly and known exactly what would happen next.

And he answers, carefully and accurately, with the good version, the one he has thought about, the one that is actually true.

And forty minutes later his aunt is stacking plates too loudly in the kitchen and one cousin has gone out to the car and his mother is doing the specific silence she does, and the dish that took two days is sitting in the middle of the table with everybody's fork put down.

The last time, in February, he did not sleep afterwards.

Because he was right. That is the part he cannot get comfortable with. He goes over it and he was right, in substance, at every stage, and it cost his aunt a Sunday she had cooked for since Thursday.

He is going again next week. He has already started, this morning, in the shower, preparing.

Salt is a small quantity and it is put in on purpose

Put the plate down a minute, because there is a sentence in Colossians about speech that people quote at each other and almost nobody looks at properly.

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.Colossians 4:6

Seasoned with salt.

Now think about salt for a second, actually think about it, not as a metaphor about being punchy but as the thing in your aunt's kitchen. It goes in in small quantities. It is measured. Its whole job is to bring out what is already in the dish, and the one thing everybody knows about it is that too much of it is worse than none.

Nobody has ever eaten a spoonful of salt on purpose.

And look at the clause on the end, because it is the instruction. That ye may know how ye ought to answer every man. Not what. How. The verse assumes you have the right answer and is entirely occupied with the manner of it.

Hear this at your aunt's table. You are not a man with a truth problem, and the written word is what settles it, not politeness. Scripture gives you a measure rather than a subject, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a word land, and He has never needed a whole meal in order to do it.

Now let me name the mechanism, because you have felt it three times and never described it.

Your uncle is not asking a question. He is doing something else with a question shaped object: keeping a position warm, or getting a rise, or saying something to the room about himself. Half the sentences at any family table are like that.

You have been answering the words instead of the thing, and the written word puts the measure on the manner for exactly that reason, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows which is which at a table.

That is not a moral failure. It is what a serious person does, and being serious is not a defect. But it means you have spent three Sundays giving a careful answer to a question nobody at that table was actually asking, and the careful answer is the very thing that makes it detonate.

Hear this too. You are not being asked to hide what you think, and Scripture is what says so. What is written assumes you know how you ought to answer, which means there is an answer and you are permitted it, and the Spirit of God has never asked a man to be less true, only better measured.

And now the thing I want you to see about next Sunday, because it is the whole difference.

You cannot control your uncle. You can control what you sit down to do.

If you sit down to be understood, you will take the hook, every time, because being understood at that table requires the room to concede and the room is not going to concede over a pudding.

If you sit down to be with them, the hook goes past. It goes into the water and stays there and the meal continues and your aunt clears plates at a normal volume.

Same convictions. Same man. A different thing being attempted.