The Line He Took Off The End Of The Prayer

His father ended every prayer in this room the same way for forty years.

Bless the food, bless the hands that made it, and come quickly, Lord.

Then amen, and then the noise, because in this house the second after amen is the loudest second of the day.

He took it over when his father died. Nobody appointed him. He was simply the one at that end of the table the next time everyone was there, and his mother looked at him, and he prayed, and he ended it the way it had always ended, and he heard his aunt make a small sound at the sound of it.

Thirty years he has prayed that prayer. And for most of those thirty years those four words came out of him without any thought at all, the way your hand finds the light switch in your own hallway.

He stopped saying them about two years ago.

He did not decide to. He noticed it afterward, the way you notice you have driven home without remembering the road. He got to amen, and stopped, and the food went round, and nobody said anything, and he sat there with his hands still together thinking, that is not how that prayer ends.

The next week he stopped there again.

And now it is just how he prays, and it has been two years, and not one person at that table has ever mentioned it, and he has caught himself several times getting close to those words and steering around them like a pothole he knows the exact location of.

He knows exactly why, too.

There was a year he said out loud in front of these same people. He was certain, and he was wrong about the year, and nobody has ever brought it up, and something in him decided all on its own that a man who was wrong about that has forfeited the right to sound eager.

So he stops at amen. And the food goes round. And four words are missing off the end of the oldest thing in this family.

If there is a line you have quietly taken off the end of something, pull a chair in. There is room.

Whose words those were first

Here is the thing about those four words that he had never thought about, because you do not examine a sentence you learned from your father.

They are not his. They were not his father's either.

They are the last exchange in the Bible.

And the Spirit and the bride say, Come. And let him that heareth say, Come. And let him that is athirst come. He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.Revelation 22:17, 20

Look at who is doing the asking there. The Spirit says come. The bride says come. And then the man holding the pen says it back.

There is no date in it anywhere. Nobody in that passage is calculating. It is pure wanting, said out loud, and it is the note the whole book of Scripture chooses to end on.

You are asking a thing the Holy Spirit is already asking, and the asking has never once required a calendar to go with it. Revelation 22:17 puts the Spirit and the bride in the same sentence saying the same word, and the word is written down for the church to keep saying, which means those four words at the end of your father's prayer were on loan from the Spirit long before they were ever yours to be embarrassed about.

The year was never in the prayer

Let us separate two things that got welded together at that table, because separating them is what puts the words back in your mouth.

There was come quickly, Lord. And there was the year.

The prayer never had a year in it. Not once in forty years of your father saying it, not once in thirty of yours. The year came from somewhere else entirely and got attached, and when it fell it took the prayer with it, and it never had the right to.

You have a longing that is entirely legitimate and a date that was never issued to anybody. Scripture keeps the times and the seasons in the Father's own power in Acts 1:7 and hands out no exceptions, and it is the Spirit who stirs a man to want the day without ever telling him where it sits on a calendar, so the wanting survived a year that did not.

Want it without scheduling it. That is the whole permission, and it is the tradition's own hard lesson, bought expensively, handed to you free.

What the table has been hearing

Now the two years of stopping short, because that is what is actually going on in this room.

Everybody at that table learned that prayer from the same man you did. Every one of them knows where it ends.

You were heard stopping, and being heard stopping is not the same as being judged for it. Psalm 139:4 says there is not a word in my tongue but lo, O Lord, thou knowest it altogether, and it is written of the words a person does say and the ones they do not, and the Spirit who searches the deep things has been listening to the pause at the end of that prayer for two years without once calling it a fall.

Nobody at that table has been keeping score. They have been waiting, the way a family waits.