The Aunt Who Sits On The Other Side

At the christening they put two rows between them, and nobody planned it, and everybody knew.

That is the thing about a family that has split down the middle of a church. Nothing is ever declared. There is no announcement, no falling out you could describe to a stranger in under a minute. There is simply an arithmetic that everyone in the room has learned to do without looking: who is sitting where, who is going to the kitchen at the same time, who will hold the baby after whom.

Seven years ago there was a meeting about a building and a pastor and some money that had been handled a certain way, and voices got raised, and people who had prayed together for twenty years found they could not do it any more. Half went to the hall on the main road. Half stayed. And her aunt, who used to plait her hair on a Sunday afternoon and who taught her every hymn she knows, went one way and her mother went the other.

They are perfectly civil. That is almost the worst of it. There are birthday messages and there is a wave across a car park and there is a smile that goes nowhere near the eyes.

She has prayed about it for years. She wants that on the record. She prayed the good prayers with Scripture in them, and the tired ones in the car, and once, at three in the morning, she prayed a prayer that was really just her aunt's name said over and over until it stopped sounding like a word.

And after service, a deacon who is a genuinely good man leaned across and said: sister, has this family ever fasted over that?

She said she would pray about it. She has thought of very little else. And underneath a suggestion made in real love, what she heard was that after seven years there was still one thing untried, and that the two rows at the christening might somehow be hers to close.

If you are the one doing that arithmetic in every family room you walk into, come and sit down under the tree here a while.

Nobody is marking the way this got asked

Settle this in the first minute, because otherwise you will read the rest of it braced.

You have not prayed this wrongly, and you are not being held at arm's length while heaven waits on a better sentence. That is not a kindness offered to a woman in a car park. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been carrying seven years of worn out prayers into a country your own words were never going to reach.

Here is what happens to somebody who loves a family across a fault line. The love does not reduce. It has nowhere to go, so it turns into management: who to invite, what not to mention, which Sunday to visit which house. Prayer stops being a conversation and becomes another arrangement to keep. Then a good man adds one more arrangement, and you take it, because you would take anything.

The verb in the psalm belongs to Him

There is a line in the Psalms that is doing something specific with its grammar, and the grammar is the whole point.

He healeth the broken in heart, and bindeth up their wounds.Psalm 147:3

Two verbs, both His. Heals. Binds up.

Not enables. Not assists. Not waits for the family to arrange itself into a shape where He can begin. The psalm hands the whole of that work to God and leaves nobody in the room holding a bandage.

You are not the surgeon here, and you were never appointed one. I did not soften that to comfort somebody after a christening: it is what the psalm actually says (Psalm 147:3), and it is His Spirit, and not this page, who makes it something you can lean on in a car park with your keys in your hand.

So what is fasting, then, if it is not the thing that finally closes two rows?

The teaching under it, plainly

Fasting is not a payment. It is not leverage, it is not the missing piece, and it is not a report filed with a God who had not heard about your family. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and does arithmetic in a church hall, turning toward God with nothing held back and nothing held out.

There is no plan here. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to work toward and nothing to complete. A plan turns this straight back into a transaction, and a transaction is what has been quietly wearing this family thin.

And now something that gets said out in the open, because it matters more than the rest of the paragraph it is sitting in. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of what a doctor has told you. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once arrived in a smaller measure in anybody's house on account of a body.

And if this week is heavier than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a detour around God. That is help He has put in the world on purpose.