His Nephew Keeps Asking At The Table

The boy is seventeen and he does it at the worst possible moment every single time.

Not deliberately. That is what has taken his uncle so long to work out: the boy is not performing and he is not trying to start anything. He simply says what is in his head, and what is in his head arrives at the table because that is where everybody is.

It has happened maybe six times over two years.

It is always a real question. Something about whether it is all actually true, or a hard one about somebody who died, or once a question about a passage that was genuinely sharp and that his uncle did not have an answer for.

And every single time, there are eleven people at that table.

So he makes a joke. A good one, usually. The table laughs, the boy laughs, somebody says something about not at dinner, and the food goes round again and it is gone.

And he has never once come back to it afterward.

That is the part he has started noticing. Not the joke, which is a reasonable thing to do at a table with eleven people and two small children at it. The not coming back.

There have been about a hundred opportunities. They have been in a car together. They have carried furniture. They spent an entire afternoon in April fixing a gate, side by side, four feet apart, and neither of them said anything that mattered.

And what he thinks about it, when he lets himself, is that the table is not really the problem.

The table is the excuse the boy hands him six times a year, and he has taken it every time.

Because a question at a table can be joked away and everybody stays comfortable, and a question in a car has to be answered.

And he loves that boy. Everybody knows it. He would do anything for him, and he has, twice, in ways nobody talks about.

And the boy has asked him six times and has never once had an answer.

And you have somebody who asks at exactly the wrong moment. And you have been treating the wrong moment as the reason, and you have never gone and found a right one.

Sitting in the house and walking by the way

There is a well known instruction in Deuteronomy about how any of this passes between one person and another, and the interesting thing is where it says it happens.

You shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.Deuteronomy 6:7

Four settings, and not one of them is a formal one.

Sitting in the house. Walking by the way, which is the ordinary business of going somewhere. Lying down and getting up, which are the two least ceremonial moments in any day.

There is nothing in there about a table with eleven people at it, and nothing about a set occasion either. The whole design of it is conversation in motion, in the gaps, side by side rather than face on.

You have four settings named in Scripture and you have been treating the one difficult venue as the whole of the opportunity. It is written to talk of them when you sit in your house and when you walk by the way (Deuteronomy 6:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who arranges the ordinary hours, which is where He has always done most of this.

Now the gate in April.

Four feet apart for an entire afternoon. That is walking by the way in the most literal sense the verse could mean, and it is the exact configuration this kind of conversation actually happens in: side by side, hands busy, nobody looking at anybody.

Seventeen year old boys can say almost anything with a screwdriver in their hand and almost nothing across a table.

You have already been given the right venue and you were in it for a whole afternoon. Scripture says as iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another (Proverbs 27:17), which is a picture of two things working against each other at close quarters, and it is His Spirit who puts two people in a lane with a gate between them for four hours.

And the joke, because it needs an honest look.

It is a reasonable response at a table with two small children at it and everybody listening. Nobody would criticize it.

What is not reasonable is a hundred opportunities afterward and none taken, and you have already worked out why: a question at a table can be joked away, and a question in a car has to be answered.

That is the whole mechanism, in your own words, and you have been operating it for two years.

You are not being defeated by circumstances, you have been declining a hundred good ones. It is written that a word fitly spoken is like apples of gold in a setting of silver (Proverbs 25:11), and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies the word, which means the reason for not going back to it was never that you would have nothing to say.

And the one you did not have an answer for.

There was a sharp question about a passage and you did not have an answer. That is the one you are most afraid of and it is the easiest of all of them.

A seventeen year old who hears his uncle say I do not know, that is a good question, I have wondered about it too, has just learned something more important than any answer, which is that the thing is big enough to have unanswered questions in it and grown men stay anyway.

You are able to hand him a real I do not know, and it is worth more than a good answer. Scripture says we know in part (1 Corinthians 13:9), and it is His Spirit who has kept a man standing for decades inside a faith he cannot fully explain, which is the actual evidence a boy of seventeen is looking for.