The Night of the Funeral

Everyone had gone by half past eleven and he stayed to do the plates, because somebody had to and because he did not want to go home.

His grandmother's kitchen. Same tiles, same yellow bowl, the same crucifix over the door frame that had been there before he was born. Sixty years of that woman praying at that table every night at nine o'clock, out loud, in Spanish, whoever happened to be in the house, and if you were in the house you were in the prayer whether you wanted to be or not.

He sat down at her chair around midnight with a dish towel still in his hand and he said it to God, quietly, because he was the eldest and there was nobody left to do it.

I will keep them praying. I will keep this going. I promise You.

He meant it the way you only mean things at midnight in a dead woman's kitchen.

He did it twice. Once at Christmas, when it was easy because everybody was already there. Once in February, on the phone, with four of them, and it was awkward, and his brother had to go.

That was six years ago. There has not been a third time. The family still gathers, and they eat, and they are loud, and nobody prays, and every single time he is the one who notices, at about nine o'clock, and says nothing.

You have a table like that. Somebody handed you something as they went out and you said you would carry it. And you carried it for a little while, and then the weeks did what weeks do, and now the not carrying it has its own weight, which is heavier than the thing was.

What he thinks he did

Let me put my hand on the actual wound, because it is not the one he names.

The one he names is that he let his grandmother down. That is real and it hurts and it is also the smaller thing.

The larger thing, the one that has kept a good man from praying alone in his own car for six years, is a conclusion he has never said out loud: that the promise was the arrangement. That God gave him that woman for thirty four years and the price was the table, and he did not pay, so what he has now is not a family altar he neglected but a debt with a name on it. And you do not sit down at a table where you owe.

Come with me to a psalm that David wrote about exactly this, and notice what he does with distance.

As far as the east is from the west, so far hath he removed our transgressions from us. Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.Psalm 103:12-14

You are as far from that failure as a man can be put, and He is the one who did the putting. Psalm 103:12 picks the only pair on the compass that cannot be closed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that distance for six years.

East and west do not meet

North and south have poles. Go far enough north and you start going south, and there is a fixed and measurable distance between the top of the world and the bottom of it.

East and west have nothing. Start walking east and you can walk forever and never once turn into west. The distance is not large. It is not a distance at all. David picked the only pair on the compass that cannot be closed, and he picked it on purpose.

You are as far from that failure right now as a man can be put, and He is the one who did the putting. Psalm 103 says so and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it out of the general and lays it on a specific man in a specific kitchen at a specific hour of the night.

And then read what comes next, because it is the tenderest sentence in the psalm. He knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust.

He is not surprised. He was never surprised. The God who took your grandmother knew exactly what her grandson was made of when that grandson made a promise at midnight with a dish towel in his hand, and He did not accept it as a contract because He never needed one, and He did not hold His breath waiting for you to fail because He already knew the frame He built.

You have never once astonished God with your weakness. It is written in exactly those terms, and that is what remembereth that we are dust means, and it is His Spirit who has been holding you in that knowledge for six years while you assumed you were being watched by an accountant.

The altar was never yours to hold up

Here is the thing about an inherited altar, and my whole family runs on this so let me say it carefully.

Your grandmother did not hold that table up for sixty years. She showed up at it. The thing she was showing up to was older than she was and it did not belong to her, and when she died it did not fall over, it simply stopped having her in the chair.

You have been carrying a piece of furniture that was never on your back. You are a man who was invited to a table, not a man who was made responsible for holding one up. Scripture says the Lord pities us like a father pities his children, which is not the language of a contractor checking work, and the Spirit of God has been keeping that table standing every single one of the six years you have not been at it.

And I am not going to take you through those years. Not one of the missed nine o'clocks. An inventory is a courtroom with the chairs rearranged, and there is no courtroom in this kitchen.