The Same Eleven Words Since 1974

Eleven words. His father set them, or more likely his grandmother did and his father inherited them, and nobody in that family can tell you the origin any more.

They have been said at that table since 1974 at the latest, because that is the year they moved into the house and there are photographs.

He says them now. Has done since his father went. He is fifty-six and he has said those eleven words at the head of that table probably nine thousand times and last November he came within about four seconds of not saying them.

Thanksgiving. Nineteen people, the leaf in and the card table on the end, and everybody quiet and waiting for him.

And he sat there and thought: I do not mean this.

Not doubt about God. He was straight about that with himself right there in the pause. It was the words. They have gone completely flat in his mouth. He could say them while thinking about the trailer light that has been out since August, and has, and knows it.

He had another line half ready. Something he had heard at a men's breakfast that had actually got him, back in the spring.

And nineteen people were waiting, so he said the eleven, the way he always says them, and everybody said the amen and reached for things.

But he has not let it go since. Because if a man says a thing nine thousand times and feels nothing, what exactly is he doing at the head of that table? And would it not be more honest, at fifty-six, to say something he actually means?

God told them to stack stones for children who were not born yet

Let me say straight off that the instinct is a good one and I am not about to laugh at it.

A man who notices he is saying words he does not feel, and who is uncomfortable enough about it to sit there in front of nineteen people weighing it up, is a more honest man than one who never checked. That impulse comes from wanting the real thing rather than the form of it. Hold onto that.

But hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a pat on the back: that line is not yours to feel, it is yours to keep, and the two are different jobs. That is not my soft handling of a hard question, it is what stands written in Joshua, where a nation is told to build something out of stones for the express benefit of people who had not been born, and the same Holy Spirit who put that command in the book was at your table in November.

Read the reason God gives, because He gives one and it is not about the men doing the stacking.

In the future, when your children ask you, What do these stones mean? tell them that the flow of the Jordan was cut off before the ark of the covenant of the Lord.Joshua 4:6-7

The whole point of that pile is a conversation nobody has had yet.

Nothing in the instruction is about how the men carrying those stones felt while they carried them. Some of them were bored. Twelve men lifting rocks out of a riverbed on a hot afternoon after the miracle had already finished, and God says do it anyway, because of a question a child will ask in twenty years.

So this is yours right now rather than pending your feelings coming back: what you did in November was hold up a marker for nineteen people, and the written word says a memorial exists for the sake of the ones who will ask later, and the Spirit of God is the one who has been carrying that line across three generations of a family that cannot even remember where it started.

Now let me ask you what you did not ask yourself in the pause.

Who else at that table is holding onto those eleven words?

The daughter who has not been to a church in eleven years and comes home twice a year and knows every syllable. The son-in-law who did not grow up with anything and has said to his wife, more than once, that the thing he likes most about that house is the bit before the food. The grandchildren, who could not tell you what any of it means and could recite it in their sleep.

You went flat and read it as a fault in the words. Meanwhile the words were doing their work on eighteen other people in the room while you were thinking about the trailer light, because what is written does not run on the feelings of the man reading it and the Holy Spirit was working the whole table.

And here is the guard: none of this says a family may never change a line, or that spontaneous prayer at a table is a lesser thing. Say the new one too, if it moved you at the breakfast. Add it. Nothing is stopping a man saying the eleven and then saying something of his own.

What is written stands whether the man speaking it is feeling anything at that moment, and the Holy Spirit works through a marker that has been kept far more often than through one that was replaced when it went quiet.