The Night The Plate Went Cold

Dorothy said the blessing at that table for thirty one years.

It got settled in about the third month of the marriage, and it never got discussed. He would sit down, and there would be about half a second of quiet, and if he did not move, she started. So he never moved.

She was good at it, too. She prayed like a woman reading a list she kept in her head all week. Her sister's back. The Hollands' boy. The man at the tire place whose wife had left. Rain, when it was needed, and thank You for the rain, when it came. He would sit there with his hands in his lap and his head down, and at the end of it he would say amen and reach for the potatoes.

Thirty one years of amen.

Then in November her sister had the baby early and Dorothy went to Bowling Green for eleven days.

First night by himself, he fried a pork chop and warmed up green beans out of the jar and sat down at that table at ten past six with the radio off.

And the room waited.

He could hear the clock over the stove, which he had not heard in years, and he sat there with his hand on the fork, and it was ridiculous, a grown man of sixty one waiting for somebody to start.

So he put the fork down and said it.

"Lord. Thank You for this. Amen."

Four seconds. It came out flat, like a man reading a serial number off the back of a machine, and his face went hot, and he picked the fork back up.

Then he set it down again.

And he kept talking.

Out loud. To God. About his knee. About the Kubota and the hydraulic line he had been meaning to get to since August. About their boy in Amarillo who had not called since Easter and how he did not know whether to be angry about it or worried about it. About whether Dorothy was going to be alright coming back over that mountain if it snowed.

Eleven minutes, out loud, in an empty kitchen, and the plate went stone cold in front of him and he did not care one bit.

He had thought of himself for thirty one years as a man who did not have a voice for this.

Turned out he had eleven minutes' worth.

You know that half second.

Maybe it is your wife. Maybe it is your husband, or your mother, or the friend who always says it better, or the pastor whose number you have. Somebody in your life prays, and you are the one who says amen, and somewhere along the line you quit thinking of yourself as somebody God talks with directly.

He said thy Father, not theirs

Jesus gave a lot of instruction on a hillside that day, and most of it He gave to a crowd.

Then He said this, and He changed who He was talking to.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:6

Every word in that verse is singular. Thou. Thy closet. Thy door. Thy Father.

He did not say go and stand where the praying happens. He said go in a room by yourself and shut the door on everybody, including the people who are better at this than you are, and talk to your Father.

Yours.

You have a Father in that room, and He is in there ahead of you every time. Matthew 6:6 says He is the God who is in secret and who sees in secret, and Romans 8:15 says it is the Holy Spirit of adoption who puts the word Father in a man's mouth in the first place, so the very impulse you had to say something at that table was not you working up your nerve. It was Him.

And here is the part that undoes thirty one years of quiet in about a minute.

The reason it came out flat is not that you are unpracticed at praying. It is that you have been listening to somebody good at it for three decades and grading yourself against her.

You are not being graded, and you never were. Romans 8:26 says plainly that we know not what we should pray for as we ought, and that the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, which means the worst sentence you ever get out is picked up and carried by God's own Spirit before it clears the ceiling.

Read that again if you need it. God wrote into His own word that His people would not know how to say it. And then He put the Holy Spirit on the job of carrying it anyway.

Nothing here takes her out of the room

Now let me be extremely plain, because a message like this one goes wrong fast in the wrong hands.

Dorothy did not do anything to that man. She did something for him, every night, for thirty one years, and she was right to, and the day he starts praying at that table is not the day she stops.

If somebody has been praying for you, that is a gift and not a theft. Keep it. Ask for more of it. Praying for each other is the family business and it always has been.

What is on offer is not independence. It is a second chair pulled up at a table that only ever had one occupied.

You are not standing behind anybody in a line. Hebrews 4:16 says come boldly unto the throne of grace, and the reason a plain man can walk up is that the one seat between God and men is already filled by Jesus Christ Himself, which means nobody in your life was ever supposed to be trying to sit in it, and nobody in your life ever will be asked to.

That takes weight off her, by the way. She was never meant to be your line. She was meant to be your wife.

And your own line has been open the whole time, running out of a room you have not gone into in years.