Two Sets of Everything

The food is on the table and nobody has picked up a fork, because the household has arrived at the grace again.

One half of this table holds hands. That is simply what happens: the hands go out sideways without anybody deciding, because in that half of the family they have gone out sideways for forty years. The other half does not hold hands and has never held hands and finds the whole business faintly alarming, and now there are four hands out in the air over the roast potatoes and two people looking at them with the polite expression of guests at a ceremony in a language they do not speak.

Then there is the wording. One tradition has a set line, the same one every time, said quickly and warmly and completely automatically, and the little ones can do it before they can read. The other tradition believes strongly that a prayer should come out fresh, which in practice means a long pause, and then somebody saying, do you want to do it, and somebody else saying, no, you do it.

You also own two of everything else. Two Christmases, in effect, because one side opens presents on the evening and one side opens them in the morning, and both sides know, with total certainty, which one is normal. Two ways of doing a birthday. Two answers to whether you go to the late service or the early one. Two entirely different beliefs about what happens to a Sunday afternoon.

And somewhere in the middle of it, a child, holding a fork, who asks the question that lands on the table like a dropped plate. Which one is the proper one?

That is where the smiling stops in this house, usually. Not because the child has done anything wrong. Because you do not have an answer, and you have not had one for a while, and the question sits down at the table and eats with you.

Here is the thing nobody says out loud in a kitchen like that. Underneath every negotiation about grace and Christmases and which service, there is a quieter question, and it belongs to the adults, and it is this: is this house a real one, or is it the version we managed after the first version did not work?

I want to answer that one. Not the grace. The other one.

Nobody's household started tidy

Let me say something about Scripture's families before I say anything about yours, because we have inherited a picture of them that the text does not support.

The households in the Bible are not matched sets. They are assembled. They contain arrivals, second marriages, losses, in laws from other nations, children raised by people who did not give birth to them, and long stretches where nobody in the story knows how it will turn out. Read Ruth slowly some evening and count how many of that family's members ended up in that family by the ordinary route. There is a widow going home with nothing, a foreign daughter in law who came because she chose to, a man who took on a responsibility that was not originally his, and a baby laid in an old woman's lap by neighbors who called it her own.

That is not a broken household with a good ending bolted on. It is the household, and it is the line the king came through, and God did not run a tidier one alongside it as the proper version.

You are in a house God is not embarrassed by, and He has never once described it as the second attempt. Psalm 68:6 says God setteth the solitary in families, and setteth is His verb, done by His hand, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lands that on a woman clearing two kinds of stuffing off a table and quietly wondering whether any of this counts.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains.Psalm 68:6

Notice what that verse assumes. It assumes people who were on their own. It does not say God takes a family that has always been a family and keeps it that way. It says He takes the solitary, the ones who ended up unattached by whatever route, and He sets them into a household. Setting is a builder's word. It is what you do with a stone.

You were set into that house deliberately, and a stone that has been set is not a stone that fell there. Scripture uses the same picture for believers, calling them living stones built up into a spiritual house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a set thing feel settled in a kitchen where the arrangements still feel provisional.

Two ways of loving Him, and no rank between them

Now the graces, and I want to be careful with both of them, because there is a version of this that quietly declares a winner and I am not going to write it.

The set line said quickly, in the same words, since somebody's grandmother taught it: that is a family loving God out loud in a way they can pass to a four year old. The long pause and the fresh words: that is a family loving God out loud in a way that refuses to run on autopilot. Neither one is the compromise. Neither one is the mature version. They are two households that learned to say thank you differently, in different rooms, before either of them met the other.

Paul writes about exactly this kind of difference, and what he says is remarkable for what it refuses to settle. One man esteemeth one day above another; another esteemeth every day alike. And then, instead of ruling, he says each does it unto the Lord and gives Him thanks. Two practices, one direction, and the apostle declines to appoint a winner.

You have permission to hold both traditions in one house without ranking them. Romans 14:6 puts two different practices side by side and calls both of them thanks given to God, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the pressure out of a Sunday where somebody has been quietly waiting for a ruling that is not coming.

And now the part I most want to say, because it is the one that does damage when it goes unsaid.

Do not give this job to the child.

Not the one with the fork, not the eldest, not the easy one who gets on with everybody. A child in a house like this will volunteer for it, and they will be good at it, and they will translate between two sets of grandparents like a small diplomat, and everybody will say how well they are doing. It is too much weight, and it is not their weight, and the household is the adults' to hold.

You were given this household to carry, and the carrying was never meant to sit on a ten year old. Scripture puts the household under those who lead it and tells fathers not to provoke their children but to bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, and the Spirit is the one who quietly lifts a job off a child who took it on because the room needed somebody to.