Grace, From Memory

Boots by the door, stove going, the whole lot of them round the table, and everybody waits for you because that is how it has always gone.

You say it. Forty seconds, maybe less. The same words your father used with one line of your own added on somewhere in the eighties.

And then the bowls go round and somebody starts on the fencing and the youngest one says something that makes his mother laugh and the room fills up.

And you sit there and eat.

Here is what nobody at that table knows.

You have been reading it. Since about the second week of January, when the thing happened that you have not talked about, you have been standing up and reciting forty seconds from memory the way a man recites a phone number, and there has been nothing behind it at all.

You do it well. That is the strange part. Nobody has any idea. If anything you have been doing it better since January, because a man who is concentrating on getting the words right does not stumble.

Let me say something before we get anywhere near why.

I am not accusing you of anything.

You have not done a wrong thing. Saying true words over your own family without a feeling behind them is not deceit, and I am not going to hand you a word like hypocrisy, because it does not fit a man who has stood up every night since January and said it anyway.

I am saying I know when it became a recitation. That is all.

A door that shuts

Here is Jesus, and He is not talking about a failure of sincerity. He is talking about where a man goes.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:6

Look at what He is actually recommending, because it is not more feeling and it is not better performance.

It is a room. And a door. And a shutting of the door.

He is describing a place where there is no audience, and the reason He gives is not that public prayer is wrong. It is that a man needs somewhere his praying is not being watched by anybody, including the people who love him most.

And there is no such room in your life. That is what I want to say plainly. There is a table with fourteen eyes on it and nowhere else at all.

So let me turn and speak straight at you, with the stove ticking behind you.

You are already known in secret by a Father who sees there. Not one day, not once the feeling comes back, not when the forty seconds means something again. Right now, sitting at the head of that table with your bowl in front of you, you are seen by the One the verse names, and being seen in secret is offered in that sentence as a mercy rather than as an inspection. That is not my comfort. That is what is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a written line and lays it on a real man in a real kitchen.

Now, why did it go to memory in January?

Because a man in front of his family does not have room to be honest, and he should not have to be.

Standing up at that table and saying the true thing in January was never available. Not out of cowardice. The youngest one was sitting right there, and your wife has enough on, and the whole point of that forty seconds is that it holds the room steady.

So you did the only available thing, which was to keep the words and put yourself somewhere else while they came out.

That is not sin. That is a man protecting his own table at his own expense, and it has cost him eight months of having nowhere to be honest.

And hear this, because it is settled and not still open. You have a place with a door on it and a Father inside it, and that place has been available every night since January. The word says pray to thy Father which is in secret, and the secret is offered as a room rather than as a hiding place, and it is His Spirit who carries a written line into a real house on a real winter evening.

The forty seconds at the table is not the problem. The problem is that it has been the only forty seconds.