Every Observance, And The Quiet Inside It

The candles are lit at the right time. The bread is covered. The wine is where it goes.

You have never once been careless about any of it, not in twenty two years, not through the year you were ill and not through the two years your mother was dying.

Your children have grown up inside a rhythm that will still be running in them when they are sixty, and that is not a small thing to have given anybody, and you know it.

And somewhere in there, some year you could not put a date on, the inside of it went quiet.

Not gone. That would be easier to describe and easier to talk about. Quiet, the way a house is quiet when everybody who lives in it happens to be out and all the furniture is still there.

You still do everything exactly right. You are, if anything, more careful than you used to be, and I think you know why that is.

And nobody in your life has the faintest idea.

Let me say something before anything else.

I am not accusing you of anything.

Keeping a practice with nothing felt behind it is not hypocrisy and I refuse to use that word about a man who has covered the bread every week for twenty two years. And I am not going to suggest that the quiet is something you brought on yourself by being insufficiently attentive.

I am saying I know the house is quiet. That is all.

Examine me

Here is a psalm that asks for something almost nobody asks for.

Examine me, O LORD, and prove me; try my reins and my heart.Psalm 26:2

This is not a man protesting his innocence, although the psalm around it has some of that in it.

It is a man who wants to be looked at.

Try my reins and my heart. The reins are the inward parts, the seat of what a person actually wants when nobody is watching. He is inviting an inspection of exactly the place he cannot see clearly himself.

And notice the direction. He does not offer a report on his own interior. He asks somebody else to go in and look, which is what a man does when he genuinely does not know what is in there and has stopped trusting his own account of it.

So let me turn and say it straight to you, at that table with the candles going down.

You are welcome to be examined rather than required to explain. Not one day, not once you can locate something in yourself worth reporting, not when the quiet lifts. Right now, with the family gone through to the other room, you are the man in that psalm, and he asks for the search because the search is a mercy rather than a threat. That is not my sentiment. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a written line down onto a real man at a real table on a real Friday.

Now, why has the carefulness increased?

Because when the inside goes quiet, the outside is the only thing left that can be got right, and a man like you needs something to be got right.

That is not sin and it is not a warning sign. It is what a careful person does when the part of the practice that used to carry him stops carrying him: he carries the practice instead, and he does it beautifully, and it costs him.

And take this in, because it is already decided rather than pending. You have twenty two years of kept practice standing in the record, and the record was never a report on your interior weather. The word says try my reins and my heart, and asking for that is itself an act of faith by a man who cannot see in there, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real dining room on a real evening with the candles burning down.

He is not disappointed by the quiet. He has been in the house the whole time it has been quiet, and He is the only one who knew.