The Bible Went On The Shelf And Grace Still Got Said

It went up on the shelf in the spring and he has not taken it down since, and every single night at that table he has said grace over the food.

He would not be able to tell you which day the reading stopped. There was no decision in it. He read every morning for about twenty two years and then one morning he did not, and then a week went by, and then it was summer.

But grace still gets said. Out loud, at the head of that table, in the same eleven or twelve words his father used, and he means them, or at least he does not not mean them, and his wife has never once said a word about the shelf.

Here is what he cannot square. If he had lost his faith, he would know what to call it. He has seen men lose it and he would recognize the shape. This is not that. He believes it. He would go to the wall for it.

He has just stopped expecting anything, and the reading was where the expecting used to live, so the reading went first.

It was after. He went without for that particular matter, more than once, quiet about it, nobody knowing, and it stayed exactly where it was, and it is still there tonight.

And a man at the sale barn said, in the way men say things sideways: you ever fast about that?

He said he had. Just that. And the fellow nodded and moved on and neither of them said another word about it, which he was grateful for.

If your book has been on a shelf since the spring and you still say grace, come and sit at this table a while.

Nobody here is calling you a hypocrite

Let us get that out of the road first, because it is the thing sitting on your chest.

A man who says grace while his Bible is on a shelf is not putting on a show. He is doing the thing he still can do while the thing he cannot do waits. That is not two faced. That is a man keeping a light on in a room he is not currently sitting in.

You have not lost anything and you were never once graded on the reading. That is not a soft word offered to a man at his own table. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been at every one of those suppers, hearing eleven words in your father's phrasing, and has never once thought less of the man saying them.

And nothing on this page will tell you why the thing did not move. Nobody knows why. Anybody who says otherwise is guessing and calling it faith.

A man in Scripture had the same stretch

There is a passage where somebody describes exactly this and does not dress it up.

My soul hath them still in remembrance, and is humbled in me. This I recall to my mind, therefore have I hope.Lamentations 3:20

Read the order of it. First the honest report: my soul has this in front of it and I am brought low by it. He does not skip that part and he does not apologize for it.

Then a deliberate act. This I recall to my mind. Not this occurred to me. Not I felt better. He goes and gets something, on purpose, and puts it in front of himself, and what he goes and gets is the mercy of God being new in the morning.

That is a man doing with his mind exactly what you are doing with grace at that table: keeping hold of the one thing still in reach while the rest of it waits.

You are already doing the thing that passage describes, and you have been doing it every night since spring. I am not saying that to make an awkward summer sound better: it is the plain sequence in the text (Lamentations 3:21), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes an old habit a real anchor rather than a leftover.

And what you went without bought nothing

Here is a thing that gets said flatly, because a suspicion about it has been sitting there since spring.

It did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so there was no failing available to it. It did not fall short of a length, it was not undone by your motives, and it did not almost work.

You did not do it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on you. The word is blunt that God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent (Numbers 23:19), which means He is not a machine that gives out when it is worked right either, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight off a man rather than a point in a debate.

And nobody here is promising it will work next time. You would not believe it, and I am not going to say it.

Now here is a thing I will say out loud rather than in fine print. Some folks must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing off you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard road with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, or you simply do not know, talk to your doctor before you go without anything, and let what they say be the answer. You are not one step further from God on account of a doctor's advice. The word 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 come in a smaller measure to a man because of his body.

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