The Question Came With the Rice

The rice goes down in the middle of the table at ten past two, still steaming, in the big pot with the dented lid, and there are nine people squeezed round a table built for six.

It is that hour of a family Sunday when everybody has eaten too much and nobody has moved yet. Somebody's toddler is under the table with a wooden spoon and a serious expression. Plates are being scraped and stacked. Two conversations are running at once and neither of them is being properly listened to, which is the safest part of the whole afternoon.

Then his aunt, who has fed half that room since before he could walk, leans back with the serving spoon still in her hand and asks it in the kindest voice in the world.

"So. Where are you worshipping these days?"

And the table does not go silent, because tables do not do that outside of films. What happens is smaller and much worse. He hears his own voice say "oh, here and there, you know," and then he hears it say "did Deborah get her exam results?" and the conversation moves on and the plates keep stacking, and only two people in that room know what has just happened.

You know, because you were the one who said it. And she knows, because she has been asking you that question for two years and she has never once been answered.

You took it out to the car with you. You are still carrying it now.

What is holding you up was never your answer

Let me name the weight first, my friend, because you have been carrying it politely for two years and nobody has ever once asked you what it weighs. The written Word in 2 Timothy 2:19 establishes that belonging, and the Holy Spirit bears witness to it within you.

It is not that you left. Most days you have made your peace with that. It is not even that people ask. They ask because they love you, or because it is what you say to a person you last saw in a foyer, or because they genuinely want to know how you are and that is the only vocabulary they have for it. Scripture gives this freedom solid ground, and the Holy Spirit carries it into the breath you are taking now.

It is the twenty seconds. It is that after all this time you still do not have a sentence, and somewhere in these two years you began to suspect that the missing sentence means something is actually missing. That a faith which cannot be produced in one breath over a serving dish might be a faith that has quietly gone thin.

Hear me. That is a lie, and it is a very quiet one, and it has been eating at you between the rice and the gravy for two whole years.

Nevertheless the foundation of God standeth sure, having this seal, The Lord knoweth them that are his.2 Timothy 2:19

Read what the seal actually says.

It does not say the Lord knows them that can account for themselves. It does not say them that have a name to give when asked on a Sunday. The seal set on that foundation is His knowing, and it is not your explaining. A foundation with His seal on it does not shift because a question arrived with the pudding.

You were standing on it the entire time you were changing the subject. You were standing on it in the car. You are standing on it now, reading this, with your shoulders somewhere up around your ears. The written Word does not make your explanation the foundation, and the Holy Spirit is present while your words are still forming.

And there is a man in the ninth chapter of John I want you to look at, because he was asked considerably more than you were. According to the written Word, Christ Himself is your standing, and the Holy Spirit keeps that truth alive beyond the table.

They questioned him twice, formally, with his parents brought in and everything. They put to him questions he genuinely could not answer, about who this Jesus was and where He came from and what it all meant, and watch what he does with the part he does not know. He does not manufacture it. He says plainly that he does not know, and then he stands on the one thing he does know, which is that he was blind and now he sees.

He did not win the exchange. They threw him out. And the very next thing that happens in that chapter is that Jesus goes looking for him, and finds him, and speaks to him alone.

So no, I am not going to hand you a line for next Sunday. I could. It would be a good one, and you would rehearse it in the car with the engine off, and you would have swapped one performance for another, and by the summer you would be dreading the delivery of it exactly the way you now dread the silence. It is the obligation that has to go. Not the wording.