The Blessing at Your Own Table

The candles are lit and the room has gone quiet the way it goes quiet, and he is looking at the tablecloth.

Six of them round the table on a Friday evening. His wife has just set her hands down flat on either side of her plate, which is what she does. The older girl is watching the flames because she always watches the flames. The younger one has his eyes screwed shut a full ten seconds early, because at five that is how you understand it is done. The bread is under the cloth. The jug is full. Everything in the room is ready and everything in the room is waiting on one man.

And he says, without lifting his eyes, the same four words he says most weeks.

Simon, would you please.

And Simon does, and Simon does it beautifully, and there is nothing wrong with Simon, who is a good man and never once asked for the job. The words go over the table and land on the children and the evening carries on into soup.

Here is the thing nobody at that table knows. He has known those words since he was nine years old. He could say them in his sleep. He has said them in his sleep, according to his wife, twice. Once, alone in the car with the engine off outside the hardware store, he said them out loud to the windshield, all the way through, and then sat with both hands on the wheel for a minute feeling strange and slightly guilty, as though he had gone through a door he did not have a key for.

The reason he does not say them at his own table is a sentence, and it arrives about half a second before he would open his mouth. It says: you have not read enough for that. It never argues. It never has to. It has never once been asked to produce its credentials, because in twenty years nobody in that kitchen, including him, has ever thought to ask it who it is.

He cannot tell you who first said it to him. I have no idea either, and I am not going to invent one, because it is not mine to guess and a guess would be worse than the silence. What I can tell you is where the words at a table actually come from, and who hands out the tongue that says them, and it is not the voice that arrives half a second early.

You know that half second. Something ordinary and good, plainly yours to do, is a breath away from being done, and a sentence gets there before you do, and you step back and let it be done by somebody who was never told they could not. Nobody at your table knows either. So let me read you what the prophet said about a mouth, and then what God said about a blessing, and let us see whose voice has actually been appointed here.

The tongue was given, and it was given for the weary

There is a line in Isaiah where the servant of God describes his own equipment, and every clause of it is worth slowing down for.

The Lord GOD hath given me the tongue of the learned, that I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary: he wakeneth morning by morning, he wakeneth mine ear to hear as the learned.Isaiah 50:4

Start with the verb, because everything else hangs off it. Hath given. Not achieved, not qualified for, not sat an examination and been awarded. Given. And the word behind learned is a plain Hebrew word meaning the taught ones, the ones under instruction, which is to say: not the ones who have finished. The tongue of the taught is not the prize at the end of the reading. It is what is handed to somebody who is still in the middle of it.

Hear where this comes from, because it is not my encouragement: Isaiah 50 says the tongue was given, and the Holy Spirit is the one who hands a written line to a man standing at his own table with the candles already lit. You have a tongue that was given to you and not awarded to you, and the giving happened long before you counted the pages.

Now read what it is given for. That I should know how to speak a word in season to him that is weary. Not to the scholar. Not to the assessor. To the weary, which in that house on a Friday evening is a girl who has had a week at school she has not talked about, and a five year old who is frightened of a dog on the corner, and a woman who set her hands down flat on the cloth because she is tired in a way she has not mentioned. The tongue was issued for exactly the people sitting at your table, and they are the ones it goes past every week.

And then the last clause, which is the mercy of it. He wakeneth morning by morning. The learning never stops arriving and it was never meant to be finished before the speaking begins. Read the order in Isaiah 50 and hear who is speaking it: the same Spirit who wakened the prophet's ear morning by morning is awake in your kitchen. You were given the ear and the tongue in the same sentence, and neither of them came with a date when they would be ready.

They put the Name on them, and God did the blessing

Now the second half, and this is the one that takes the weight off a man's chest.

When God set up the blessing of His own people, He did not look for the most learned mouth in the camp. He gave Moses the words and told him to give them to Aaron and his sons, with the plain instruction: this is how you bless them, say to them. Three short lines. And then, straight after the three lines, comes a sentence almost nobody reads, because by then everyone has moved on.

And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel; and I will bless them.Numbers 6:27

Look at who does what. They put the Name on. He blesses. The man speaking is not the source of the blessing and never was: he is the one who lays the Name of God over the heads at the table, and God Himself does the blessing behind it. That is why the learning of the speaker was never the mechanism. A blessing has never once worked because the man saying it had read enough. It works because the Name is true and the God who owns it keeps His word.

That is written down in Numbers 6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a priest's instruction into an ordinary man's mouth in an ordinary kitchen. It is already yours, this office at your own table, and it was given with the words and not with a reading list. His word set no examination in front of the blessing, and His Spirit is not marking a paper you were never entered for.

One plain thing before we go on, because I would rather say it than leave it out. If the voice that arrives half a second early has been saying heavier things than this, and the evenings have been going somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Asking for help out loud is one of the ordinary things a free man does.