Forty Years of the Same Words and I Stopped Hearing Them

You have not missed a meal in forty years. Not one that you can remember, and you would remember.

Same words. Your grandfather's, more or less, with one clause you dropped in the eighties because you could never say it without stumbling. Nineteen words. Four seconds. Hands flat either side of the plate, eyes down, and then eat.

You have said it in restaurants, quietly. You have said it on aircraft. You said it at your wife's bedside over a hospital tray she did not eat and you have said it every day since she died.

It is, by any reasonable measure, the most consistent thing you have ever done.

And on Tuesday, at about twenty past one, you were halfway through a sandwich in your own kitchen and you stopped, because you could not remember whether you had said it.

Not whether you meant it. Whether you had said it at all.

You had. Obviously you had; forty years does not skip. But you had no memory of the four seconds, none whatever, and when you tried to go back and find them there was nothing there.

And that opened a much worse question, which you have been carrying since Tuesday and have told nobody about: when did you last actually hear it? Not say it. Hear it.

You think it might be ten years. It might be more than ten years.

Look at where He looked

Sit there a minute with your hands where they are. I am not going to tell you to find new words.

Let me say the true thing first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not going to prosecute a man for a faithful habit: forty years without missing is not hypocrisy and it is not a dead work, whatever you have been calling it since Tuesday. Most people cannot sustain anything for forty days. You have kept a word over your own table through a marriage, a bereavement and every ordinary Tuesday in between, and heaven did not fail to notice it because you stopped noticing it. Nobody is on trial at this table.

But you have asked a real question, so let me take you to the account and show you a detail that is easy to read past.

And he commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and took the five loaves, and the two fishes, and looking up to heaven, he blessed, and brake, and gave the loaves to his disciples.Matthew 14:19

Four verbs in a row: looked, blessed, brake, gave. And the first one is the one nobody preaches.

Looking up to heaven. Before the blessing there is a direction. He does not close His eyes and lower His head; He lifts His face and puts the words somewhere. The blessing has an addressee before it has a syllable, and the account records the look first because the look is what makes the words a sentence to somebody rather than a form of words about something.

The four seconds you cannot remember were still spoken to Someone who was listening, and He has never once required you to be present in order for Him to be. That is not me consoling a man about a habit. That is what is written, and what the account puts first, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a table where the same nineteen words have been said for forty years.

Here is what nobody explains about a blessing that has gone quiet. When you speak over your food, you are not maintaining anything and you are not renewing a contract. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about His own provision. Your mouth is a door. God has been coming through it for forty years, including the ten you cannot remember, because the door does not depend on the doorkeeper paying attention.

The words have not gone empty, and a habit that outlives your attention is not a dead one. Scripture says His word does not return unto Him void, but accomplishes that which He pleases (Isaiah 55:11), and there is no clause in it about the speaker's concentration, and the Spirit is the one who has been carrying nineteen words to heaven from this kitchen every day since the eighties.

What actually went missing

Now let me name it precisely, because you are precise and a general reassurance would be no use. What is written is exact about this, and the Spirit has never dealt in vagueness.

What went missing is not the meaning and it is not the sincerity. It is the direction. Four seconds with the eyes down and the hands flat is a form of words performed downward, at a plate, and after enough repetition the sentence stops going anywhere and starts merely occurring.

That is not a fault of the words. Those are good words and your grandfather chose them well. It is that a sentence needs somebody to be said to, and the looking up is what supplies that, and somewhere in ten or fifteen years the looking up quietly went and nobody noticed, including you, because the words kept going perfectly well without it.

That is not a crisis of faith and I am not going to inflate it into one. It is a mechanical thing and it has a mechanical remedy, and what is written never once required a man to feel something before he could address God. The Spirit is not asking you for a fresh experience.

God has been at that table for forty years and He has not been waiting for a better performance of nineteen words. It is written that He is not far from every one of us (Acts 17:27), and the same Spirit who breathed that line has been in this room for every one of the meals you cannot recall, which is why it lands as an account of where He has been rather than as encouragement to try harder.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to write new words, to lengthen it, to pray at more length, or to take up anything. Nineteen words is enough and it was always enough. Nothing here is a program. If tomorrow you say it and notice nothing at all, nothing is lost.

What you say over your own plate is a real thing, and it has been real on every one of the days you cannot remember. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and forty years of four seconds is a considerable quantity of freight.