The Words The Old Ones Left

He is thirty four and he is standing at the back with his hands folded, doing the thing he has done since he was nine.

Everybody else has their eyes shut. The aunties are three rows in front and they are saying it the way they always say it, low, on the beat, without one person setting the pace, which is the part he has never understood: nobody starts it and everybody starts together.

He knows the shape of it. He knows where it lifts. He knows the two places where the whole yard goes quieter, and he knows the line near the end that his grandfather used to say slightly ahead of everyone, which used to embarrass him and which he would now pay money to hear.

He does not know the words.

Not properly. He knows about six of them in a row and then a gap, and then a phrase, and then more gap, so what he actually does is mouth along, shaping his lips to the general weather of it, moving his mouth on nothing.

He has been doing this for twenty five years and he is very good at it. Nobody has ever caught him.

Today it is his uncle's day, and the yard is full, and the food is under cloths on the long table waiting, and halfway through the prayer he stops mouthing along and just stands there with his mouth shut.

Because a thought has arrived and it is a hard one. He is thirty four. The people who know these words are all older than him. There is not one person in this yard under fifty who could carry that prayer on their own, and the aunties are not going to be here forever, and when they are gone the words go with them, and he will be the man standing at the back of a smaller yard shaping his lips on nothing at all.

Afterwards, eating, somebody asks him to say the blessing over the second table.

He says he is not the right person for that.

They were not keeping them. They were leaving them.

Sit down with me for a minute, because there is a sentence in the psalms that is about exactly this yard, and it changes who those words belong to.

We will not hide them from their children, showing to the generation to come the praises of the Lord, and His strength, and His wonderful works that He hath done.Psalm 78:4

Read the direction of that. Not preserving. Not guarding. Showing to the generation to come.

The old ones in that yard are not the owners of those words. They are the carriers. And a carrier is not carrying something for himself; a carrier is carrying something to somebody, and Scripture names the somebody: the generation coming after. That is you, standing at the back with your mouth shut.

So hear this while the plates are still going round. You are not a visitor at that prayer. The written word says the whole point of the handing down was the ones who came later, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that prayer alive across four generations of people who could easily have let it drop. It was not kept from you. It was kept for you.

Now, the gap in your mouth. Let us be honest about what it is and what it is not.

It is not evidence that you do not belong. It is evidence that nobody sat you down, and that is a thing that happened to you, not a thing you did. There is a difference between a man who was refused and a man who was busy at the time the teaching was going on, and neither one of them is a man with no claim.

And I want to name something about the mouthing along, because you have carried it as a shameful secret for twenty five years and it is not one.

You have been standing in the right place, in the right posture, at the right hour, holding your hands the way they hold theirs, for twenty five years. You have kept the shape of the thing when you did not have the content of it. The written word says the praises of the Lord are shown to the generation to come, and the Spirit of God has plainly been showing them to you the long way, through your feet and your hands and your ears, for a quarter of a century, while you thought you were getting away with something.

That is not fraud. That is an apprenticeship nobody told you had started.

Look at what happens to those words in the psalm afterwards. They are told to children who are not born yet, who will rise up and tell their own children, and the whole chain runs on people receiving something they did not make. Not one link in that chain composed the words. Every single one of them was handed something and passed it on, and the psalm calls that faithfulness, not imitation.

So the question is not whether you have earned the prayer. Nobody in the history of that yard earned it. The question is whether you will take what is being handed to you while the hands are still there.

And hear this plainly, because it is the piece that gets a man moving. You are not too late. The aunties are three rows in front of you and they are alive and they would be undone with joy if you asked, and the same Spirit who kept that prayer through the years that could have killed it is not likely to drop it in the last fifty feet. What is written is that these things are shown to the generation coming. You are the generation coming.