The One At The Table Who Stopped

They hold hands round that table every Sunday, and he has been holding two hands and saying nothing inside them for about a year.

It is his mother's house. There are always more people than chairs. Somebody prays before the food and it is usually his aunt, and she prays for the same thing she has prayed for since it started, and everybody says amen, and the bowls start moving.

He says amen. Of course he does. He is not going to be the one who does not.

But he stopped somewhere around last autumn, and it was not dramatic and there was no crisis and he could not tell you the week. The family went without for that matter, together, more than once, and every one of them meant it, and the thing did not move, and something in him just sat down and has not got up since.

He has not told anybody. Not his wife, not the priest, and certainly not his mother, who would take it personally and then take it to God, and he cannot face either.

And after Mass last month his cousin, who is one of the kindest people alive, said: we should all fast for it again.

He said good idea. And what he felt was not hope and was not even resistance. It was a kind of flatness, and underneath the flatness a very old fear that he is now the weak link in a house of believers.

If you are the one at the table who stopped, come and sit here at this end of it. Nobody is going to make you say amen.

Nobody at that table became a weak link

Let us settle that first, because it is the thought that has been running underneath all of it.

A person who goes quiet inside a praying family has not failed the family. Something in you took the weight of a disappointment that everybody else spread out between them, and it took it alone, because you are the one who does not say things at that table.

You are not the weak link, and you were never once assessed as one. That is not a kindness offered to a man passing a bowl. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been holding two hands with you every Sunday and has known exactly what was happening inside them, and has never once thought less of you for it.

And nothing on this page will tell you why it did not move. Nobody knows why. Anybody who tells you they do is guessing and calling it faith.

The sentence a father said in front of Jesus

There is a moment in Mark that a man in your position ought to have read out to him.

And straightway the father of the child cried out, and said with tears, Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief.Mark 9:24

Look at what he actually says. Both halves. In one breath, in public, in front of everybody, with his son on the ground beside him.

He does not resolve it. He does not pick a side. He holds belief and unbelief in the same sentence and hands the whole contradictory thing over, and Jesus does not correct him, does not tell him to sort himself out first, and does not treat the second half as a disqualification.

You are allowed to be both of those at once, and it does not put you outside anything. I am not saying that to make a Sunday easier: it is what the father said and what Jesus did next (Mark 9:24), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who makes that a chair a man can actually sit in at his own mother's table.

And what your family went without bought nothing

Here is a thing that needs saying flatly, because it has been feeding the flatness.

Their going without did not fail. It was never a mechanism, so failure was not among the things that could happen to it. It did not fall short of a length, it was not spoiled by anybody's motives, and it did not almost work.

Nobody in that house did it wrongly, and the outcome is not a report on anybody's faith. Scripture 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 produces a result when a family works it correctly, and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight lifting rather than a point somebody wins at a table.

And nobody here is going to promise it will work the next time. You would not believe it and it would not be honest.

Now something said in the open rather than in fine print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from them. If anybody in that family lives with diabetes, is pregnant or nursing, takes medication, has ever had a hard relationship with eating, is underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure, they should speak to their doctor before going without anything, and let that answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. 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 come in a smaller measure to a household on account of a body.

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