Everybody Comes and Nobody Suggests

The plates go down, and there is that half second where everybody's hands hover, and then everybody looks at you.

Not unkindly. Nobody is waiting to see whether you will do it, because of course you will do it, and there is a small warm ritual in the looking. You say the words. Not the long version on a weeknight. Everybody says amen, in a decent unison, and one of them says amen and can you pass the water in the same breath, and the evening carries on.

You are also the one who knows what day it is. You know which Sunday has the thing after, and whose shoes are where, and that the car needs to leave at nine minutes past rather than quarter past. You do the wake ups. You do the second wake ups. And everybody comes. That is the part that is hard to explain to anyone outside the house, because it does not sound like a problem: nobody complains, nobody digs their heels in, everybody gets in the car in a reasonable mood and is perfectly pleasant to people all morning.

It is only that if you did not say anything, nothing would happen.

The Bible you bought for the house at Christmas is on the shelf by the router. It has been opened. It is not a prop, and somebody has definitely read some of it, and it lives there in a permanent state of good intention.

There was the plan you made in the spring for the four of you to read something together. That lasted four days, and the fourth day was mostly you reading out loud while a phone buzzed face down on the table, and then a work thing happened, and it quietly did not resume, and nobody has mentioned it since, including you.

And once in a while, somewhere around the amen, a thought goes past that you do not much like the look of. You are not sure whether this house has a faith in it, or whether it has you in it.

You know this one, and I want to be careful with it straight away, because there is a way of talking about this that ends with you sitting at your own table quietly grading the people you love, and I am not going to hand you that.

The faith of a house has often run through one name

Open the second letter to Timothy and read the fifth verse slowly, because it is one of the most quietly encouraging sentences in the New Testament for anybody in your position.

Paul says he calls to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in Timothy, which dwelt first in his grandmother Lois, and in his mother Eunice. Two names. A grandmother and a mother. Nothing is said about a believing father anywhere in Timothy's story, and when we meet the family in Acts the only thing recorded about the man is that he was Greek.

So the faith of that household came down a line that everybody would have described, at the time, as one woman and then another woman quietly keeping something going in a house where it was not the general policy.

Nobody in that family knew they were building the foundation for one of the most important lives in the early church.

You are standing in a line that Scripture treats with enormous respect. It is written that the unfeigned faith of a household dwelt first in a grandmother, and the Holy Spirit is the One who moved it down through that house, from one woman's hands to a boy who would carry letters that outlived the Roman post.

I want to name something that this idea removes, because I think you have been carrying it.

The picture in your head, the one where a household worships together in a warm and coordinated way, is not the standard, and it is not the test. A house where one person keeps it is not a defective version of a Christian home. It is one of the most common shapes a believing household has ever taken, and it is the shape the New Testament actually describes when it gets specific about a family.

You have not failed to produce something that other houses produce naturally. Scripture never once measures a home by how many people initiate the prayer, and the Holy Spirit is not conducting a comparison between your kitchen and somebody else's.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice.2 Timothy 1:5

What is actually at your table

Now let me say something about the people who look at you when the plates go down, because they are not a category, they are your family.

They come. That is not nothing, and I suspect it stopped being counted a long time ago because it is reliable. In a week when nobody in that house is under any obligation whatsoever, they get in the car. They say amen and they mean the amen as much as anybody at any table anywhere. They are not opposing you and they are not humouring you, and whatever else is or is not happening in them is not yours to see and is certainly not yours to grade.

And they carry things too. Somebody in that house is the one who notices when a person has gone quiet. Somebody remembers birthdays, or fixes what is broken, or is kind to the neighbor nobody else can face. Those are not lesser things, and God did not rank them below being the one who knows what time the car leaves.

You were never appointed the judge of your own household. His word says the Lord looketh on the heart while man looketh on the outward appearance, and the Holy Spirit does His work in a person out of sight, on a timetable He does not publish, in your family exactly as He did in you.

Then there is the loneliness, which is the real thing under all of this, and it deserves to be named plainly rather than solved.

It is lonely to be the only one who begins. It is lonely to hold the calendar, the intention and the ache all at once while everybody around you is cheerful and along for it. And it has a particular sting when the people are lovely, because there is nothing to push against, so it goes nowhere and just sits in you around the amen.

You have a Father who sees the one who starts the prayer. Scripture says He that seeth in secret shall reward openly, and the Holy Spirit carries what you say over those plates straight into the presence of God, whether or not it is followed by anything except a request for the water.