Nobody Ever Asked Me To Say It

He is forty-six and he has never once said it out loud in front of his family.

Not because he does not believe it. He does, in a way he would describe as unspectacular and total, and he has organized his whole adult life around it, and anybody watching from outside would say the man is devout.

It has simply never come up.

That house is full of it. His mother, his grandmother before her, an uncle who prayed at every meal for fifty years including one memorable time in a hospital corridor. Nobody has ever had to declare anything, because there has never been a moment when it was in question.

So there has never been an occasion where a man of forty-six stands at that table and says, in his own words, in the first person, that this is his.

He has said grace at that table probably two hundred times. He has read at two funerals out of that family. He has driven his mother to a service every Sunday for four years since her hip.

None of that is the same thing and he knows it, which is why this is in an article and not in a diary.

What he does not know is why it matters to him, since nobody is asking, and everybody already assumes, and saying it now would be strange and might even look like something was wrong.

He said his own line first

Let me tell you why it matters, because you have been carrying the question without an answer and the answer is not complicated.

A thing that is assumed has never been chosen where anybody could see. And a man can live an entire devout life inside an assumption and still, at some level he does not visit often, not know whether he would have picked it.

That is not doubt. Nothing in you is wobbling. It is the ordinary hunger of a person who was given something good and has never had the dignity of taking it.

Now hear this and take it as settled rather than as encouragement: saying it out loud is not a formality and it was never optional, and there is a scene where a whole nation who already assumed it are stopped and made to say it. That is not my sentiment talking, it is what stands written in the twenty-fourth chapter of Joshua, and the same Holy Spirit who has kept that house for four generations is at that table with you.

Read what happens. These are not outsiders. These are people who have been inside it their whole lives.

But if serving the Lord seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve. But as for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.Joshua 24:15

Choose for yourselves this day.

He does not assume it on their behalf even though he could. He is old, he is at the end, they have followed him for decades, and he still stops the whole thing and requires a first-person answer.

And notice the order. He says his own line first. As for me and my household. He does not stand outside the choice supervising theirs. He declares his own and then waits.

So take this now rather than after somebody asks you for it: the saying is yours to do and it is not a formality, because the written word stops a people who already assumed it and requires each of them to choose out loud, and the Spirit of God has been in that house for four generations without ever making the declaration unnecessary.

And the guard, because this could be heard as a complaint against your family and it is not one.

Nothing here says the assumption was a failure. That house gave you something a great many people spend their lives looking for, and your grandmother and your uncle and your mother did it right, and the prayers at every meal for fifty years were not a substitute for anything.

What is written simply keeps the personal answer personal, and the Holy Spirit has been at work in you inside an inheritance that was genuinely good.