You Do It, Grandpa

Hollis Barnard has hosted Thanksgiving in the same dining room for thirty-eight years and has never once said the blessing over it.

He asks Roy. Roy is his brother-in-law, a deacon at the church on Kell Road, and the man can pray. Thirty seconds, no wasted words, always something in it about the hands that made the food. Everybody at that table would tell you Roy is the one for it.

If Roy is not there, Hollis asks his cousin Denton. If Denton is not there he asks the oldest man present, and if there is no old man he asks his wife, and Charlene has bailed him out at more suppers than she could count. It is done so smoothly now that people think it is manners.

It is not manners.

When Hollis was nineteen he sat down at his new wife's family table for the first Sunday dinner after the wedding, and her father, who liked him, said, "Hollis, why don't you ask the blessing." And Hollis bowed his head and said, "Lord. Thank You for. Thank You."

And then nothing.

The whole thing went out of his head the way a name goes out. Eleven seconds of a quiet room with eight people's eyes shut and his own eyes open, and then Charlene's mother put her hand over his and finished it for him, kindly, in about four sentences, and everybody said amen and passed the beans.

Nobody at that table thought a thing about it. Nobody remembers it. One person in that room has carried it for forty-seven years.

He has never tried again.

Then came a Thursday in October, nothing special about it. Nell's parents had a school thing, so the girl came to her grandparents for supper, and Charlene was at her sister's, and it was Hollis and an eight-year-old and two plates of chicken and rice.

Nell put her hand out across the corner of the table and waited.

Hollis looked at the empty chairs. There was no Roy. There was no Denton. There was not one old man in that house who was not him.

He said, "You want to do it, honey?"

And Nell said, "You do it, Grandpa."

So he did.

"Lord. Thank You for this food. Thank You for this girl. Amen."

Eleven words. Not one of them good. His voice came out of him sideways and he heard it and it sounded like a man reading a parts list.

And Nell said, "Amen," the way an eight-year-old says amen, like it counted.

Because it did.

He sat there a while with the fork in his hand and did not start eating, and his granddaughter took a bite of chicken and asked him whether chickens can swim.

One mediator, and the seat is taken

Paul stops in the middle of a letter about how a church runs and does arithmetic.

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus;1 Timothy 2:5

He counts. One God. One mediator. And then, so nobody can wonder, he names Him.

Look hard at what is missing from that sentence. There is no allowance made for households. There is no clause about the ones with a good voice for it. Paul does not say one mediator, plus a deacon on Kell Road for the men who go blank. He says one, and the seat is occupied, and the Man in it is the one who has been in it since a Friday afternoon outside a city wall.

You are not standing in line behind anybody. The chair between you and God has one occupant, He is already sitting in it, and there has never been a second chair to queue for. That is not a nice thought about your supper table. The written word puts the number at one and names the Man, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that old sentence and lays it on the shoulders of a man holding a fork.

Now hear the other half, because half a truth here does real damage.

Roy is not the problem in this message. A man who can pray at a table is a gift to a table, and a family that has one should thank God for him. Nothing in here asks you to think less of him, or to stop asking him, or to make some point at Thanksgiving by refusing to pass it down the row. Direct access has never meant doing without anybody.

The trouble was never Roy. The trouble is that a man can hand a thing over so many times that he quietly concludes he was never licensed to do it.

You have your own access, and it was not issued to you on the strength of your vocabulary. Scripture says the Spirit Himself makes intercession for us when we do not know what to pray for as we ought, which means the Holy Spirit stationed Himself at exactly the place where your words run out, and He was standing there at nineteen too.

Let me go back to that nineteen-year-old, because he is still in the room.

He is standing at his father-in-law's table with three words out and nothing behind them and eight people waiting. And I want to say plainly what nobody said to him that afternoon: he had not failed at anything. He was a boy in a new family with his heart going, and his mind did what a mind does.

There was no verdict handed down that day. He handed himself one, and he has been serving it for forty-seven years, and no court in heaven ever sat.

You were heard the first time. The three words that got out of your mouth reached the Father whole, because the written word says we come to Him through one mediator and not through a performance, and the Holy Spirit carried what you could not finish.

Here is a law, and it holds everywhere: heaven answers agreement, not eloquence. God has never once graded a prayer on its grammar. He has never sent a man back to prepare. The tax collector in the temple managed seven words with his eyes on the floor and went home justified, and there is not a syllable in that story about how well he put it.

Right now, as you read this, the seat at your own table is being handed back to you, and it was yours the whole time. The word of God says one mediator, one, and the Spirit who wrote that line through Paul is the same Spirit ready to carry eleven bad words off a Thursday supper table.

Say the eleven words. Let them come out sideways.