Eleven Years of Plates on Our Knees

It started when the girls left, and neither of you can remember agreeing to it.

The dining table went first, in the sense that it stopped being used and then, about a year later, stopped being a dining table and started being where the ironing lives and where the post gets put and where a jigsaw stayed for four months.

Now it is two plates on your knees on the sofa at ten past seven, both of you facing the same way, with something on that neither of you would choose and both of you will watch.

You are not unhappy. That is the thing you would want said if anybody asked, and nobody ever asks. Twenty-nine years, and she is still the person you would ring first. You are not in trouble.

It is only that last Tuesday the internet went down for about forty minutes at exactly the wrong time, and the two of you ate in the quiet, and it was fine for about ninety seconds and then it was not, and you both noticed, and neither of you said anything about noticing.

And what you have been thinking since, on and off, at odd moments, is this: in eleven years, has anything been said out loud in that room? Anything at all? Not chat. Not what did the doctor say. Something said, on purpose, over the two of you.

You cannot think of one instance.

A word and a prayer, and that is the whole apparatus

Sit forward a minute. I am not going to tell you to sell the television, and I am not going to give you a marriage program.

Let me say the true thing first, because Scripture will not let me be sentimental and the Spirit is not in the business of shaming two people who are doing fine. Eleven years of plates on knees is not a marriage in decline. It is what happens when a house gets quieter and two tired people find something easy and keep it. Nobody in that room did anything wrong. Nobody is on trial.

But you noticed something on a Tuesday, and noticing is not nothing, so let me put the right thing in your hands rather than a large one.

For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving: for it is sanctified by the word of God and prayer.1 Timothy 4:4-5

Look at how small the apparatus is. Not a table. Not a room. Not a family. Not a posture, not a candle, not a particular form of words. The word of God and prayer. That is the entire mechanism by which an ordinary plate of food becomes a thing set apart.

And notice what is being sanctified. Not the people. The creature: the food itself, the ordinary supper, the thing on your knee that you are about to eat in front of a program neither of you chose.

Your plate on a sofa is exactly the object that verse is talking about, and God has never once required a dining room in order to do this. That is not me making a small thing of your evenings. That is what is written, and what the verse says the mechanism is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that plain and lays it in a front room at ten past seven.

Here is what nobody explains about saying something over food. When you speak over that meal, you are not conducting a ceremony and you are not putting your wife through a performance. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about His own provision. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. It does not require an occasion and it does not require anyone to be impressed.

One sentence out loud in that room tonight is the whole of what is being asked, and it does not have to be well made. Scripture says whether ye eat or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), which is God attaching the ordinary to Himself rather than raising the bar on it, and the Spirit is the one who makes that live rather than merely be true.

Why nothing gets said in that room

Now let me name the thing accurately, because I think you have half diagnosed it and got it slightly wrong. What is written will name it properly, and the Spirit is not making a case against either of you.

You have been thinking the problem is that you have run out of things to say. I do not think that is it. Twenty-nine years in, two people have said most of the ordinary things, and that is not a fault, it is arithmetic.

The actual gap is different, and the Tuesday exposed it. It is that nothing gets said over the two of you. Chat is horizontal: it goes between you. A blessing is vertical: it comes down over both of you at once, and it is the only kind of sentence that puts two people facing the same direction on purpose rather than by furniture.

Eleven years of facing the same way and never once being under the same word.

That is not a marriage problem and I am not going to inflate it into one. What is written never once required a couple to be in difficulty before a word was worth saying over them. The Spirit is not waiting for a crisis.

The word that sanctifies an ordinary supper does the same work in a front room as it does anywhere else, and it does not know the difference. It is written that whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), which is deliberately the widest sentence Paul could write, and the same Spirit who breathed it is in that room every evening at ten past seven.

And hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to eat at the dining table, or to clear the jigsaw, or to turn the television off permanently, or to institute anything that either of you will be quietly dreading by Thursday. Nothing here is graded and nothing here is a new regime. If you say it once and never again, it was still said.

What you say over two plates in a front room is a real thing, and it does not become more real in a dining room. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man saying eight words over a supper with the volume down is not doing something smaller than a church.