He Says Grace and Means None of It

Ten past six, and the dish is on the trivet in the middle of the table with the oven glove still under it because nobody has moved it yet.

Four of them. The oldest one has her phone face down beside her plate, which is the house rule and she is being ostentatious about keeping it. The middle one is arguing about the size of his portion before he has been given any. The youngest one looks up and says the thing she says every single night, in the same voice, with the same small impatience.

"Dad. Grace."

So he does it. Eleven years of the same words, more or less, the way his own father did it and probably his father before that.

"Lord, thank You for this food. Thank You for this family. Be with those who are having a hard night. Amen."

Four amens come back at him, one of them with a mouth already half full, and the dish gets picked up, and somebody wants the salt, and that is that. Twelve seconds. Nobody notices anything at all.

He has not meant one word of it in five weeks.

Not since a Thursday. Not since the phone call, or the appointment, or the thing that happened in the parking lot afterward that he has not described to anybody, including his wife, including in his own head.

He keeps saying it because of what would happen if he stopped. They would ask. The youngest one would ask right there at the table with the dish in her hands, and he would have to either lie to her or start talking about a Thursday, and he is not going to do either of those things over a casserole while a twelve year old watches his face.

So every evening he opens his mouth and hands out a sentence he does not believe, in his own voice, at the head of his own table, and something quietly tears another inch.

He has not prayed on his own since. Not once. He tried it in the truck outside the school ten days ago, got four words in, and stopped, because the next thing that was coming up out of him was not a prayer. It was a question with an edge on it. It had "why" at the front of it and a name at the end of it, and he was not going to say that out loud in a school parking lot.

That is you, and it does not have to be a table.

Yours might be the worship service where you stand up because everyone stands up. It might be the group chat where you type the amen emoji. It might be the bedside prayer with your child's hand in yours, ending in a word you cannot feel the floor under any more. It might be that you have simply gone quiet, and nobody has noticed yet, and you are half hoping they do and half terrified.

Here is the first thing, and it is not a technique. I am not going to correct how you feel about God this week. Not one line of this is going to defend Him to you or explain your Thursday, because I do not know why it happened, and I am not going to invent a reason and hand it to you with a kind face on it.

Pour out is not a polite word

Here is the sentence this whole message stands on, and I want you to hear how physical it is.

Trust in him at all times; ye people, pour out your heart before him: God is a refuge for us.Psalm 62:8

Pour out. That is the word for emptying a vessel completely. Upside down, both hands, shaken, until what was at the bottom comes out too, because the bottom is where the sediment always is.

It does not say share your heart with Him. It does not say bring Him your concerns. It does not say pour out your heart after you've strained it through a cloth and got the lumps out.

And look at the last clause, because that is the reason the first clause is safe. God is a refuge for us. The place you are pouring into is not going to crack, and it is not going to be shocked, and it is not standing there hoping you keep it civil.

You are not disqualified from praying by the fact that everything you have to say is an accusation. Psalm 62:8 is an instruction to empty the whole vessel in front of Him, sediment included, and the Holy Spirit is described in Scripture as the one who helps us pray when we do not know how, which is a promise written for exactly the man who cannot get past four words in a truck. The unedited version is the one the verse is asking for.

The Book is full of the ugly version

I want to show you something about the psalms, because they get read at funerals in a soft voice and people forget what is in them.

"Why standest thou afar off, O LORD? why hidest thou thyself in times of trouble?" That is Psalm 10:1, and it is a man asking God why He is standing at a distance and whether He is deliberately hiding.

"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" That is the opening line of Psalm 22, and the reason you know it is that Jesus said it out loud from the cross, in public, in Aramaic, at the top of His voice.

Nobody edited those out. Nobody put a note in the margin apologizing for the tone. They are in the hymn book of the people of God, to be sung by everybody, on purpose.

You have permission in writing to say the sentence with the edge on it, and it is not a step away from God. The psalms put the accusation and the trust in the same songs and the same mouths, Psalm 22 above all, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries a man's honest words the last few inches when his own faith cannot throw them that far. A question is not unbelief. It never was.

Grace at six o'clock is not a lie

Now the part you've been flogging yourself with for five weeks.

You think of yourself as a hypocrite at your own table. Twelve seconds a night of saying words you do not feel, in front of children who believe you.

Let me offer you a different reading of the same twelve seconds, and you can take it or leave it.

A man who keeps a light burning in a house he cannot see in is not lying about the dark. He is keeping the light on. There is a difference between saying a thing you do not feel and saying a thing you do not believe, and I think, if you are honest, it is the first one and not the second. You have not stopped believing there is a God. That is rather the whole problem. You are furious with somebody you are quite sure is there.

You were not written off in the week you stopped feeling it, and no verse anywhere makes God's welcome depend on your mood at the head of the table. What is written says He is a refuge for us, without one condition attached about the state of the person coming in, and the Spirit of God is called the Comforter rather than the inspector.