The Only One In This House Who Prays

Somebody says grace at your table now, and it is you, and there is a particular quality to the silence while you do it.

Not hostility. It is gentler than that and harder to name. It is the silence of people being polite about something. Somebody's fork touches a plate. Somebody's eyes come up a half second early. And then it is over and the food goes round and everybody is warm with you again.

You are loved in that house. Nobody is unkind. And you have begun, slowly, over about three years, to feel like a guest in the family you were born into.

That is the ache. Not persecution. Just a slight distance where there did not used to be one, and you are the reason for it, and you would not undo it.

Not a mission field

Let me say something early, because it matters more than anything else here.

Your family is not a project.

There is a way of thinking about this that turns every gathering into an assignment. Who is closest. What was said. Whether that question about church was an opening. And I understand exactly why it happens, because you love them and the fear for them is real, and love without a plan feels like doing nothing.

But a person can feel the difference between being loved and being worked on, and they can feel it from across a room, and they will feel it long before they hear a word you say.

You have been given people to love rather than a field to work, and God has never once needed a relative of yours to be handled. Joshua 24:15 has a man declaring for his own house rather than negotiating anybody else's, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the actual persuading in a family and always has.

And they are real people with their own reasons. Your brother probably has an experience behind his flat answers that you have never asked about. Your father may be right about a thing he says regarding church people, and you have heard it as an attack because everything arrives on that frequency now.

Somebody in that family is right about something. Finding out which thing is more useful than any argument you have prepared.

You are able to ask a real question of somebody you have been praying about, and asking has never once been a lesser act than telling. The Spirit of God is the one who opens a conversation nobody planned, and it is written in Joshua 24 that a man spoke for his own house and left the rest of the room to answer for itself.

As for me and my house

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the LORD, choose you this day whom ye will serve; ... but as for me and my house, we will serve the LORD. (Joshua 24:15, King James Version)

Look at the structure of that speech, because it is almost always quoted wrong.

Joshua does not tell them what to choose. He tells them to choose. He lays out the options with real neutrality, including the option of not serving the LORD, and he does not follow anybody home to check.

And then he speaks for exactly one household: his own.

You are responsible for one house and one only, and God has never once handed anybody the job of choosing on somebody else's behalf. It is written in Joshua 24:15 that a man said as for me and my house, which is the written word drawing the boundary of the assignment, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying the part that is not yours.

That is an enormous relief if you let it be. The weight you have been carrying to every gathering, the sense that this Christmas might be the one where you finally say the thing that lands, was never assigned to you.

Joshua stood in front of a whole nation and did not take responsibility for a single person's answer.

You have been carrying an assignment God never issued, and the outcome of another person's heart has never once been placed in your hands. The Spirit of God is the one who does that work in a family, and Joshua 24 records a man declaring for his own house and stopping there.

The stranger feeling

Now the part that actually hurts, which is not doctrine. It is the distance.

Here is what I think is happening. Something in you changed, and change in a family gets felt as a small loss by everybody, even a change everybody would call good. There is a version of you they knew for thirty years and there is a version of you now, and they are quietly adjusting to somebody they thought they had finished learning.

That is not rejection. It reads exactly like rejection and it is a different thing.

You are not being pushed out of that family, and a family adjusting to a person has never once been the same as a family closing a door. The Holy Spirit is the one who can tell the difference for you in real time, and it is written that Joshua spoke for his own house while the room was still deciding.

And there is a second thing, quieter. Part of the distance is yours. Not deliberately. But somewhere in the last three years you started arriving at gatherings slightly braced, and slightly on duty, and people feel that too.

The most loving thing available to you at the next gathering may be to turn up with nothing to accomplish. To ask about the boat. To laugh at the story you have heard eleven times. To be all the way in the room.

You have permission to arrive with no agenda at all, and being fully present has never once been a wasted evening in the economy of God. The Spirit of God is what makes an ordinary afternoon load bearing, and Joshua 24:15 puts the responsibility for one house on one man and no further.