Seven Years Old at the Kitchen Table

Trestle tables. An urn at the far end doing that thing urns do. Twenty two men and a quantity of bacon that stopped being hot about eleven minutes ago, and somebody, with the best intentions in the world, has just suggested that they go round and everyone gives two minutes on how they came to the Lord.

And they are good.

That has to be said first, because none of what follows is a complaint about these men. They are good stories and they are told without swagger, which is the part that gets you. A man three seats down did four years and describes an afternoon in the chapel there in ninety seconds without once making himself the hero of it. Another woke up in a bed with a tube in him and no memory of the night before. There is a man at the end who has to stop halfway because he is talking about a bridge in February and the ice on the rail.

Big weather in nearly all of it. The room goes quiet in the right places and nobody rushes anybody, and it is one of the better mornings that hall has had.

And he can feel his turn coming up the table the way you feel weather coming across a field.

It gets to him.

He says: "I was seven. My grandmother's kitchen. She asked me if I wanted to belong to Jesus, and I said yes, and then we had toast."

And then, because he has done this for forty three years and could do it in his sleep, he lands the joke. Something about the toast. Something about how the marmalade was the real conversion. It gets the laugh he built it to get, and he passes it down the table like a plate, and the next man starts, and the room goes on gratefully, because twenty two men in a hall genuinely did not know what to do with two sentences and none of them meant a thing by it.

He is fine all through the coffee. He is fine helping stack the chairs. He is fine right up until the car park, and then he sits in the driver's seat and does not start the engine.

Because here is what he has never told anybody in his life.

He has a comedy routine about the only real thing that has ever happened to him. He wrote it. He has been performing it since his twenties. He knows exactly where the laugh sits, and he has been using the laugh to get past the two sentences fast, and the reason he wants to get past them fast is that he believes, in a place under his ribs where nothing much reaches, that he got in through a side door while other men came in through fire.

He believes. He has believed for forty three years without a serious break in it. He has never once believed that it counted.

And the last thing he remembers of that morning is not the words, because he does not remember the words. It is his grandmother's hands. And the fact that afterwards she got up and made toast the way you make toast when something has happened.

You have sat in that car park. Maybe not a hall, maybe not toast, but a story you have learned to get through quickly.

The economy nobody set up on purpose

There is an unwritten exchange rate in rooms like that one and nobody designed it, which is exactly why it never gets audited.

Big weather tells well. A prison, a ward, a bridge in February: those have a shape, a before and an after, a moment you can put your finger on. So they get told, and they should be told, and God is glorified in every one of them. But the telling has a side effect nobody intended. Over years, a room learns that a testimony is supposed to look like that, and the men whose lives do not look like that go quiet, or go comic, which is the same thing with better manners.

And notice that nobody in that hall thinks less of him. Not one man. The whole verdict is being issued and served inside a single head, in a driver's seat, with the engine off.

So let me turn this toward you before another paragraph goes by. You are inside this thing on exactly the same footing as the man who talked about the ice on the rail, and I am not saying that to be nice to you, I am saying it because Scripture is what sets the footing rather than the size of anybody's morning. The Holy Spirit did not do a smaller work in a kitchen because the kitchen was small.

Paul had the biggest story in the book

And that is what makes the letter so useful.

If anybody ever had the right to grade an entrance, it was the man who was knocked flat on a road, blinded for three days, and spoken to out loud by the risen Christ in front of witnesses. Nobody was going to out story Paul. He had the account every one of those twenty two men would have listened to in complete silence.

Now read what he writes to a young man he loves, and count the words he spends apologizing for the size of it.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.2 Timothy 1:5

There is no road in that sentence. There is no light and no voice and no three days of blindness. There is a grandmother, a mother, and a boy who grew up in the house, and the whole thing is named with the kind of warmth a man uses for something he thinks is magnificent.

And Paul says a few lines further on that Timothy has known the holy Scriptures from a child (2 Timothy 3:15). From a child. That is the pedigree Paul is proud of on Timothy's behalf, and he sets it down in a letter he wrote knowing his own execution was close, which is not when a man wastes ink on second best things.

Take that as spoken over you. You were counted in on the same terms Timothy was, and that is not my encouragement, it is what stands written in 2 Timothy 1:5 with a grandmother's name on it; the Holy Spirit who moved Paul to write that sentence has been living in you since a Saturday morning with the marmalade out.

What unfeigned actually measures

The word Paul reaches for is the interesting one. Unfeigned. In the older English it means unfaked, without a mask, the opposite of theater.

Look at what that word measures. It measures honesty. It does not measure size, drama, cost, decibels, or how well the account plays in a hall. Paul had a whole vocabulary available and he chose the word for real rather than the word for large, and if the size of the entrance had been the thing worth praising he had a much better word to hand and did not use it.

So a faith that came in at seven at a kitchen table and has been running quietly for forty three years is not a lesser grade of the same thing. It is the thing. What Paul held up in Timothy is precisely what you have been apologizing for since your twenties.

You have unfeigned faith, and Scripture puts no adjective in front of it about how it arrived; His Spirit is the One who dwelt first in a grandmother and then in a boy at that table, and the same Spirit is the reason you have never once been able to shake it off.

And nothing is being promised you here

Because I know the other thing that runs under all of this.

Part of you has been quietly waiting for your big one. Not asking for it, exactly. Just leaving a space where it would go, on the assumption that a real Christian eventually gets a chapter with weather in it.

I am not going to tell you a big one is on the way. I do not know that. Nobody who says it knows it, and men who say it to make an article land better are writing checks against somebody else's life. You may have quiet years in front of you, the same as the quiet years behind you, and if you do, that is not a lesser life and it is not a holding pattern. Some of the strongest people in the family of God have nothing whatever to put in a two minute slot and are load bearing walls in their churches.

What is settled is that you were counted in, and Scripture says so with a grandmother's name attached, and the Spirit has been the resident witness in you all this time whether or not He ever hands you weather to talk about.