Forty Years of Sunday Mornings and I Set Every One of Them

It is the hour and a half. That is what you have finally been able to name, at seventy-three, standing at that counter last Sunday with the kettle on.

Eight o'clock to about half past nine. Between those two times, in that kitchen, on a Sunday, something happens in this house that does not happen on any other morning of the week, and it has been happening for forty years, and you are the one doing it.

Not shouting. You have never been a shouter and nobody in this family would ever describe you as one.

It is smaller and worse than that. It is the quality of your yes. It is the way you say it is fine about a thing that is not fine. It is a particular efficiency you get, a briskness that everybody in this house can read from another room, and which means, precisely, that you are going to be pleasant and nobody is going to be comfortable.

Your youngest, who is forty-four and stayed over, said something last Sunday. Not a complaint. She was buttering toast and she said, lightly, right, it is Sunday, everybody hold your breath.

And she laughed and so did you.

And then you stood at that counter with the kettle going and something went straight through you, because you have known for about twenty years that Sunday mornings in this house are like that and you had never once, in all that time, put your own name to it.

A soft answer is a description, not a test

Sit down at that table a minute while it boils. I am not going to hand you forty years to feel bad about.

Let me put a true thing down first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not have me making a case against a woman for seeing something clearly: what happened at that counter was not a conviction. It was a piece of information, and you have handled it the way a serious person handles information, which is by not looking away from it. Nobody in this kitchen is on trial. Not your youngest, who said a kind thing in a light way, and not you.

And nobody else is in scope here. Not one word of this is about anybody else's Sunday morning. Your own mouth is the only thing this article is about, which is not a punishment; it is the only thing anybody ever actually has.

Now come and look at a proverb people use as a rule and which was never written as one.

A soft answer turneth away wrath: but grievous words stir up anger.Proverbs 15:1

That is not a commandment, and the Spirit did not breathe it as one. There is no thou shalt in it. It is a description of how the world works, written the way you would write down that damp gets into a wall, and you have been reading it for years as a standard you have been quietly failing on Sunday mornings.

Read it as what it is. It says words do something. Soft ones turn a thing away. Grievous ones stir a thing up. It is a plain statement about cause and effect in a room, and the whole of Proverbs is full of them, and none of them are accusations.

And here is why that matters to a woman with a kettle on: if words genuinely do that, then the brittleness in this kitchen is not a fixed feature of Sunday mornings. It is an effect. And effects have causes, and causes can be added to.

You are not stuck with the weather in that kitchen, and the same book that explains how it got there tells you what else words are capable of. That is not me softening forty years for a woman who has just seen them. That is what is written, and what the proverb states and what kind of sentence it is, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a table at eight in the morning.

Here is what nobody explains about blessing a room. When you speak over that kitchen, you are not managing anybody and you are not performing a serenity you have never once possessed at eight on a Sunday. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it, and He does not require you to have become a different woman first.

A blessing spoken in that doorway is not you promising to be nicer. Scripture says peace be to this house, which Christ told His people to say on entering one (Luke 10:5), and it is a word spoken over a room rather than a resolution made about a self, and the Spirit is the one who carries it.

Twenty years of knowing and never naming

Now let me name the actual thing, because it is not the briskness.

What is written has never once required a woman to name a thing before He would work in it, and the Spirit is not withholding anything until you do. You have known about Sunday mornings for twenty years. What you have never done is put your own name in the sentence. In your head it has always been Sunday mornings are difficult in this house, which is a description with nobody in it, and a description with nobody in it can be true for two decades without anything happening.

That is not dishonesty. It is what people do with something that cannot be fixed by trying harder, and you had already tried harder, several times, in the eighties and again after your husband died.

And the reason trying harder did not work is that you were treating it as a character problem, and a character problem gets tackled with effort, and effort at eight in the morning on a Sunday is exactly the thing that produces the briskness in the first place.

That is not a fault, and what is written never once required you to fix yourself before a room could be blessed. The Spirit is not standing in that kitchen with a list of your Sundays.

God is not asking you to be a calmer woman by Sunday, and He has never once made your temperament the condition of His peace resting on a room. It is written that not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, saith the LORD of hosts (Zechariah 4:6), which is God ruling out effort and capacity as the mechanism, in writing, in advance, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this kitchen while the kettle boils.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you Sunday mornings will be different if you say this. I have no authority to promise you an atmosphere in exchange for a sentence, and there will be Sundays when you say it in that doorway at five to eight and the whole thing goes the way it always goes by twenty past.

What I can put in your hands is this: something can be said over that room before you get into it, and you are the one who has been given a mouth to say it. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a woman saying twelve words in a doorway in her dressing gown is doing something forty years of trying harder never once managed.