I Was Going To Say Something At The Table

It is about four hundred words and you know it the way you know a hymn.

You have been carrying it since about August. There is an opening that is warm enough that nobody bristles, a middle section that says the actual thing, and a close that you have rewritten twice because the first two versions ended too hard.

And the plan is Sunday. After the meal, before people start moving, when everybody is still at the table and nobody has a coat on.

Let me say first that I do not think the burden is fake. Something has been on you about that family for months and it is real, and I am not going to talk you out of it or suggest you are being dramatic.

What I want to look at is the delivery mechanism, because I think a real burden has quietly been fitted with a platform, and those two things are not the same and they do not do the same work.

Burden and platform

Let me draw the distinction as plainly as I can.

A burden is something God puts on a person about somebody else. It is heavy, it does not go away when you distract yourself, and it usually produces prayer before it produces anything else.

A platform is a set of conditions under which you get to speak and other people have to listen. A table after a meal, where nobody can leave without making it obvious, is a platform.

You have a burden that is genuinely from God, and no burden has ever once required a room where people cannot get up. Ecclesiastes 5:2 says be not rash with thy mouth and let thy words be few, which is the written word regulating the delivery rather than the concern, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows the hour for a thing and it is rarely the one we picked.

And the people at that table are real. Every one of them has a history with religion that you know only the outline of. Somebody there was hurt in a church and has never told you. Somebody else is closer to God than you think and has never said so at a family meal because a family meal is not where anybody says that.

At least one of them is right about something you have never conceded.

You are able to hold the burden and let the table be a table, and carrying something for people has never once given anybody the right to convene them. The Spirit of God is what keeps a real concern from turning into an event, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 5 that a man is not to be rash with his mouth.

Let thy words be few

Be not rash with thy mouth, and let not thine heart be hasty to utter any thing before God: for God is in heaven, and thou upon earth: therefore let thy words be few. (Ecclesiastes 5:2, King James Version)

That verse is about speaking in the house of God, and it applies with some force to a man planning four hundred words at a dinner table.

Be not rash. The word carries the sense of blurting, of getting ahead of yourself, of a mouth arriving before the moment does. And the reason given is not that speech is bad. It is a matter of position: God is in heaven and thou upon earth.

The instruction comes out of remembering the size of the difference between the one speaking and the One being spoken about.

You have been preparing to speak about God to people who did not ask, and no amount of accuracy has ever once made a speech the same thing as a word from Him. It is written in Ecclesiastes 5:2 that thou art upon earth, therefore let thy words be few, which is the written word putting a limit on the man rather than on the message, and the Holy Spirit is the one who actually persuades a family and always has.

And notice what the verse does not say. It does not say be silent. Let thy words be few is not a prohibition. It is a ration.

Four hundred words is not few. Eleven is few. And eleven words said to one person while you are both carrying plates to a kitchen will go further than four hundred delivered to a seated room, because the eleven can be answered and the four hundred can only be endured.

You are able to say the true thing in eleven words to one person, and a short sentence has never once been a smaller act of obedience than a long one. The Spirit of God is the one who chooses the hour and the hearer, and Ecclesiastes 5 rations the words rather than forbidding them.

What happens after you sit down

Here is the part worth thinking through before Sunday, because the speech has been rehearsed and the eleven minutes after it almost certainly have not.

The room will be kind. That is the thing nobody expects. There will be a pause, and somebody will say something gentle, and then somebody will move the conversation on, and the afternoon will continue.

And what will have changed is that from that day, at every subsequent gathering, there will be a small carefulness around you. Not hostility. Carefulness. The particular way a family handles somebody who might do that again.

You are being handed a real cost here, and no room that has been preached at has ever once fully relaxed with the preacher afterward. The Holy Spirit is the one who tells the truth about an outcome without contempt for the intention, and it is written that God is in heaven and thou upon earth, therefore let thy words be few.

So the question is not whether the burden is real. It is what you want in eighteen months.

If you want to be somebody they can say a true thing to, then the speech costs more than it buys. If it goes unsaid on Sunday, the burden does not evaporate. It goes back to prayer, which is where it came from, and it waits for the hour and the hearer.

You are permitted to carry this without discharging it on Sunday, and holding a burden longer has never once been the same as disobeying. The Spirit of God is what keeps a thing alive in a man for years without souring it, and Ecclesiastes 5:2 puts the whole weight on the fewness of the words.