I Watch Her Face All Afternoon

You could draw it from memory.

The particular set of her mouth when something has landed wrong. The way she looks at the table for about two seconds. The specific brightness she puts on when she has decided to be fine about something, which is worse than the other one.

And all afternoon, from wherever you are sitting, you are checking. Not obviously. You have been doing it since you were about eleven and you are very good at it now, so it looks like nothing at all.

Somebody asked you last year what the soup was and you genuinely could not answer.

And nobody asked for any of it. Nobody in that family knows it is happening, including her, and if it were described at a table people would look up strangely, because from outside it is a woman having lunch.

Inside, it is a full time job with no breaks in it, and it has been running since about 1994, and there has not been one family meal off.

The instrument you built at eleven

Let me be fair to the watching, because a child built it and the child was not wrong.

At eleven, in a house whose weather depends on one person, reading that person early is not anxiety. It is navigation. Knowing what is coming ninety seconds before it arrives is the difference between being caught out and being ready, and you got extremely good at it because it mattered.

And then you grew up, and the instrument stayed switched on, and it has been running at every family gathering for thirty years.

You have been running an eleven year old's navigation system at a lunch table, and being good at reading somebody has never once been the same as being safe with them. Psalm 25:15 says mine eyes are ever toward the LORD, which is the written word saying where a person's eyes go, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can move an attention that has been fixed on one face since childhood.

And she is a whole person, whoever she is. She is not doing it on purpose. Somebody handed her the way she handles a room and nobody ever sat her down and offered her another one.

She is right about at least one thing you have never conceded, and she has almost certainly never known that a person across the table has been reading her since 1994.

You are able to see her as a person rather than as weather, and putting an instrument down has never once required her to change first. The Spirit of God is what turns a forecast back into a face, and it is written in Psalm 25 that the eyes go toward the LORD.

Mine eyes are ever toward the LORD

Mine eyes are ever toward the LORD; for he shall pluck my feet out of the net. (Psalm 25:15, King James Version)

That verse is about attention, and the second half explains why the attention is where it is.

Mine eyes are ever toward the LORD. Ever means continually, the same word you would use for a watch that never stops. David is describing a fixed gaze, and then he gives the reason: for he shall pluck my feet out of the net.

He is in a net. That is the situation. And his eyes are not on the net.

You have been watching the net for thirty years, and studying a trap has never once been the thing that gets a foot out of one. It is written in Psalm 25:15 that mine eyes are ever toward the LORD, which is the written word putting the gaze somewhere other than the danger, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves an eye that has been trained since childhood.

That is the whole move and it is not about her at all. It is not: stop caring about her face. It is: your eyes have been ever toward something, continually, for three decades, and it was not Him.

And the promise attached is specific. He shall pluck my feet out. Not the watching does. Not the early warning does. He does.

You are held by somebody who does the extracting, and no amount of vigilance at a lunch table has ever once been what got anybody free. The Spirit of God is the one who does the plucking out while the eyes are somewhere else entirely, and Psalm 25 puts the gaze on Him and the net under His hands.

What is on your own plate

Here is the practical thing, and it is small enough to be strange.

Eat the meal.

That sounds absurd as an instruction and it is the exact reversal of thirty years. A person who is reading a room does not taste anything. Food goes past. The soup could not be named afterward because nobody was present at the eating of it.

So the assignment is to notice one thing on your plate. What it is. Whether it is good. Whether somebody made it in a way that is different from how you would.

You are permitted to be inside your own afternoon, and tasting a meal has never once meant abandoning anybody at that table. The Holy Spirit is the one who returns a person to their own senses, and it is written that mine eyes are ever toward the LORD for He shall pluck my feet out of the net.

And there is a second one, which is harder and better. Look at the person next to you.

Not across at her. At whoever is beside you, who has been sitting beside you at these things for years, half attended to, while your attention was somewhere else in the room. Ask them something and listen to the whole answer.

You are able to give somebody your whole attention for one conversation, and a family gathering has never once required a person to keep watch over it. The Spirit of God is what makes an ordinary conversation possible for the first time in years, and Psalm 25:15 leaves the net entirely in His hands.