He Was Already at the Table

Every Sunday at about two o'clock, Rafa says grace over the loudest kitchen on his street.

There are usually fourteen of them. His mother, who does not sit down until everybody else has. Two brothers, one wife, one girlfriend who is being extremely polite and will stop being polite by about March. Four children under nine, one of whom eats only rice. His uncle Beto, who has an opinion about everything and is wrong about most of it in a way the whole family enjoys.

They wait for Rafa. It has always been him, since his father died. He does it well and he does it short: thank You for this food, thank You for these people, thank You for the hands that made it. Amen. Then twenty seconds of absolute chaos and somebody knocks something over.

And every single Sunday, in the four or five seconds while everybody's eyes are closed and his own eyes are closed, there is something under his ribs.

It has been there a long time. Long enough that it has a texture rather than a story. It arrives in that gap, the tiny quiet before the noise starts, and it sits with him, and then he says amen and it goes back down and the plates start moving.

None of the fourteen people at that table know about it.

That is not because they are unobservant. They love him. His mother could pick his cough out of a crowd of two hundred. His brother would drive four hours tonight if he called. If any one of them suspected, this whole kitchen would rearrange itself around him within an hour.

They do not suspect, because there is nothing to see. He is not sad. He is not distant. He is the one who makes the coffee and settles the argument and carries the little one up to bed. All of that is real.

He simply has never said it, and the not saying has been going on so long that it has stopped feeling like a decision and started feeling like a fact about him. Like being left handed.

And this is where I stop writing about Rafa, because you have your own four or five seconds.

Maybe not at a table. Maybe in the car outside, or at the sink, or in the pause before you answer the phone. I am not going to ask you what is in it. Not once in this whole message, not in a hint, not in a guess. That is yours and it stays yours.

Nigh is a word about distance

I want to hand you a line that people quote at funerals and almost never apply to an ordinary Sunday.

The LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit.Psalm 34:18

Nigh. Near. It is a word about distance and nothing else.

It is not a word about approval, and this is where most people misread it. It does not say the Lord approves of the broken hearted, or is pleased with them, or is planning to do something about them at a later date. It reports where He is standing. Near.

Now put that in the four seconds before amen.

That thing under your ribs has felt, for years, like the reason there is a gap between you and God. Something in the way. A quiet disqualification that you carry into every prayer you say out loud over other people's food.

Psalm 34:18 says the opposite so plainly that it is easy to walk straight past. The broken place is not what put distance there. It is the exact address He gave for where He is. So take it into the room where you actually eat: you are not praying across a gap, and the written word says He is nigh, and the Holy Spirit is the nearness of God in a person and not a reward for having found the words.

And look at who Psalm 34 was written by and about. Not a man in a clean season. David wrote that after pretending to be out of his mind in front of a foreign king to save his own life, which is not anybody's finest hour, and he came out of it and wrote a psalm about how near God is.

He did not wait to be presentable. He wrote it from inside the mess. Scripture puts that line in the mouth of a man who had just had a week he would not have described at a family table either, and the same Spirit who carried it to him is carrying it to you now.