The Family Table Runs Beautifully And He Is Dry

Eleven years, almost every night, and it is genuinely good.

It is short. That was the thing that made it survive: about eight minutes, at the end of the meal, before anybody gets up. A bit read out, usually by whichever child is currently keen, and then whatever comes up gets talked about, and then a prayer.

His eldest, who is nineteen now and away, rang about a fortnight ago and asked whether they still do it, and when he said yes there was a small pause and she said good.

He has thought about that pause for two weeks.

Because underneath the eight minutes, and underneath eleven years of it, there is a man who has not had anything of his own with God in about two years.

He leads it well. He is not faking anything at that table and the prayers he prays are real prayers and he means them.

But every single thing he has said to God for two years has been said out loud, at a table, in front of six people, on behalf of a household.

There is nothing else. There is no private thing. There used to be, years ago, before the middle three were born, and he could not tell you when it stopped because it did not stop on a day, it just got squeezed by the ordinary business of a full house until the eight minutes were the whole of it.

And what he cannot do, and this is the actual difficulty, is say any of that at the table.

You cannot lead the family devotions and use them to announce that you are dry, and he would not want to, because it would put something on his children that is not theirs to carry.

So he leads it, and it is good, and it is the only thing he has, and nobody in that house knows.

And you lead something. A table, a group, a house. And it runs well and it is real and it is the only place your life with God happens, and you cannot say that inside the thing you are leading.

He said it out loud about himself

There is a psalm written by a man who led a nation in worship, and the first line of it is not about the nation.

O God, you are my God; earnestly I seek you; my soul thirsts for you; my flesh faints for you, as in a dry and weary land where there is no water.Psalm 63:1

You are my God.

The possessive is the first thing in the sentence, and it is singular, and everything that follows is about one man's own condition: my soul, my flesh, a dry and weary land.

This is a public man writing about his private state, and the fact that this psalm exists at all means he had somewhere to put it that was not the assembly.

You are permitted a private sentence about your own dryness and a man who led a nation wrote one down. It is written, O God, You are my God; my soul thirsts for You (Psalm 63:1), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a possessive like that available to a man whose whole spoken life with God is currently on behalf of six other people.

Now the eight minutes, because they are not the problem.

Eleven years of a household hearing Scripture read out loud before anybody gets up from the table is an extraordinary thing to have built, and it is short, which is why it survived, and the shortness was wisdom.

Your nineteen year old rang and asked if you still do it. Sit with that for a moment rather than moving past it. She is away, she has her own life, and she rang and asked, and when you said yes she paused and said good.

You have built something that a nineteen year old carries with her and checks on from another city. Scripture says train up a child in the way he should go (Proverbs 22:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes eight minutes a night into something that lodges in a person, which no amount of intensity would have achieved if it had not been short enough to last.

And the thing you cannot say at the table.

You are right that you cannot. That is not avoidance and it is genuinely good judgment: children should not be handed their father's dryness as a thing to manage, and a devotion time is not a place to be honest at that particular depth.

But there is a difference between not saying it at the table and not saying it anywhere.

You are not required to be silent about it everywhere just because you cannot say it in one room. It is written that we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses (Hebrews 4:15), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes it possible for a man to say a true thing about himself out loud to Somebody, which is not the same as saying it in front of anybody.

And the two years, and how they happened.

It got squeezed by a full house. The middle three were born and the private thing went, and there was no day and no decision.

That is what happens to every private thing in a full house and it happens to almost everybody who is doing a good job of a family. It is not negligence. It is arithmetic.

You lost it to a house full of children rather than to anything in your character. Scripture says the Lord knows our frame, He remembers that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who remembers what those years actually contained, which nobody else in that house is old enough to know.