It Started at My Own Table

He is forty seven and there are three people at his table and he has been looking over their heads for about eleven years.

Not out of coldness. He would be genuinely wounded by that reading and it would be wrong. He loves them and they know it and it is not in question anywhere in that house.

What he has done is separate the two subjects.

There is his family, which is his life, and which involves driving people places and the roof and a conversation about a phone contract that has been running since March. And there is the other thing, the thing he has asked God about since he was thirty six, which lives in a different part of him and which he has always assumed points somewhere out past the front door.

He has looked at short term trips. He has thought about the prison thing a man at work does. He has three times almost signed up for something and pulled back at the last moment, and he could not tell you why any of the three times.

Here is what he has never once said out loud.

His daughter, who is nineteen, asked him a question in the car in February. A real one. About whether he actually believed it or whether it was just what the family did.

He gave her a decent answer. He has thought about it every week since and he knows, in a way he cannot argue with, that he gave her about forty per cent of what he had.

The sentence, unsaid: I have been asking for eleven years for something to do and she asked me in the car in February.

You may know that table. Everything you have been asking for, and the people you have been looking past.

The list starts with sons and daughters

There is a promise Peter quotes on the first day of the whole thing, and the order in it is not accidental.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy.Acts 2:17

Read the widest phrase and then the first example. All flesh, which could not possibly be wider. And then, immediately, the first concrete group named: your sons and your daughters.

Not the nations. Not the crowds. Not the strangers, all of whom appear elsewhere in that chapter. The first people the promise puts a name to are the ones in a man's own house.

You are being pointed at the first group in the list, and Acts 2:17 widens to all flesh and then names sons and daughters as the first concrete instance, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a promise quoted on the first morning and lands it on a man who almost signed up for something three times.

Poured out on all flesh

Consider the verb, because it explains why the household comes first without anybody having to argue for it.

Pouring is not aiming. A thing that is poured out goes down and outward from wherever it lands, and it reaches what is nearest before it reaches what is far, and that is not a preference. It is the behavior of liquid.

So the geography of the promise is not a ranking. Nobody is being told that family matters more than strangers. It is simply that a poured out thing wets what it lands on, and what it lands on is a man in a house with three other people in it.

You are standing in the place a poured out thing reaches first, because the written word uses pouring rather than sending and pouring behaves the way pouring behaves, and the Holy Spirit is what turns an obvious physical fact into eleven years suddenly making sense.

And notice that the promise is on all flesh. Not on the impressive. Not on a category of people with a calling. Peter is quoting a prophet in order to explain to a confused crowd why the thing they are looking at is happening to a group of unremarkable people from the wrong part of the country.

You are inside a promise that was made deliberately wide, and Acts 2 uses all flesh precisely to stop anybody deciding it is for a certain kind of person, and the same Spirit who was poured out that morning is the one who fills.

Nobody at that table is a project

Now the warning, because a man who reads this correctly and applies it badly will make his own house worse.

His daughter is not an assignment. If he comes down to breakfast tomorrow with a plan, she will feel it within about nine seconds, and nineteen year olds are not wrong about that sort of thing.

What is being offered is not a campaign. It is one true sentence, said at some point, in the ordinary run of a day, in answer to something or in answer to nothing. The forty per cent answer in the car was not a failure. It was a man who had never once thought of that car as the place this was for, answering under conditions he had not prepared for.

You were never handed a project, because Acts 2:17 names a group rather than issuing a strategy, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than one more thing for a man to do badly.