He Asked Me If I Meant It

Ruth Pryor had set the same table every Sunday for forty one years, and she could have done it with the lights off.

Blue plates, six of them, her mother's, one with a hairline crack in it since the Carter administration. Forks on the left. The good napkins, which were not good, only older. The bread on a wooden board because that was the board. Salt at the end nearest her husband's chair for eleven years after he stopped needing salt, and then at the end nearest the window.

Then the grace. Her father's grace, said over a table on a farm road in 1954, which she had heard so many times before she was nine that she never had to learn it. Her mouth simply knew the shape.

That Sunday there were seven at the table and one folding chair from the garage. Her grandson Theo, who was nine, sat at the corner with his hands folded because he had been told to fold them.

She said the grace. Same words. Same pause in the same place, because her father had breathed there and so she breathed there.

Theo opened one eye. "Grandma. Who taught you that?"

"My daddy," she said. "Your great grandfather."

He thought about it while the potatoes went by.

Then he said, "But do you mean it?"

The room went on. Somebody asked for the butter. Her daughter said something about the roads. And Ruth Pryor sat at the head of her mother's table with her hand still resting on the wooden board and could not find one word.

She had the whole grace. She had the words to four hundred hymns and the shape of every custom in that house down to which drawer the good napkins lived in.

She did not have an answer, because nobody had ever asked her the question. Not once in sixty eight years had a living person turned to her and said, in the plain way a nine year old says it, do you mean it.

The plates went around. The room got loud again. And into the noise, not loud enough for anyone but the boy, Ruth said:

"Yes. I do mean it. He is real and He has been good to me and I would not know how to stop believing it if I tried."

Theo said, "Okay," and reached for the bread, because he was nine.

Ruth held the edge of the table with both hands. It had come up out of her. Not down the table to her. Up, out of somewhere underneath forty one years of blue plates, and she had never once suspected it was down there.

A reason for the hope that is in you

Peter is writing to people who have been scattered, and he tells them to expect to be asked.

But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts: and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you with meekness and fear.1 Peter 3:15

Read the last five words of the hope clause and do not hurry past them. The hope that is in you.

Peter does not tell them to acquire hope, and he does not open with a test to determine whether they have any. He assumes it, flatly, in the middle of a sentence about something else, the way you would mention a person's own hands. You cannot be asked for the reason of a hope you do not carry.

The hope is in you. Present tense, already lodged, and an apostle wrote it about people he had never met. I am not being generous with you. That is what the sentence says, and the Spirit who moved Peter to write it is the same Spirit who has been keeping that hope alive in you through years when nothing about it felt lit.

Now the order of the verse, which is what quietly undoes the ache. Sanctify the Lord God in your hearts comes first. Sanctify means set apart, give the highest place, seat Him where nothing else sits. And Peter puts that indoors, in the heart, in private, before one word is ever spoken to one asking person. The public answer is downstream. The setting apart is upstream, and it happened where nobody was watching, which is exactly why you have no record of it. That is not my inference. It is what the written word says the Holy Spirit does in a person, quietly and first.

That is the trouble with a life like Ruth's, and it may be the trouble with yours. Everything you can see is downstream. The plates, the grace, the drawer the napkins live in. You can inventory all of it and learn nothing, because what you are actually asking about was never kept in the visible column.

Christ is already set apart as Lord in you, and He was seated there long before you started looking for the receipt. That is not my reading of your heart, which I have no way to see. It is what the written word says is true of those who are His, and the Holy Spirit does not take up residence quietly for years and then require you to prove He arrived.

And here is the word Peter chose for answer. It is the word a person uses when they stand up and speak for themselves, about their own life. Not a recital. Not a repetition of what the last speaker said. First person, singular, out loud. Peter is not asking anyone to pass along a family statement. He expects the thing to come up out of the one who is asked.

You are not the housekeeper of somebody else's faith. You have your own, and it has been holding your weight the whole time you were checking whether you owned it. The word of God says the hope is in you and the reason is yours to give, and it is the Holy Spirit, not your own recall, who brings a true thing to the surface at the moment it is asked for.

Now hear the rest of it said to you and not about her, because the woman at the head of that table is you.

You know the customs. You could run the whole house from memory. And you have carried a private suspicion that you are the caretaker of an estate rather than an heir living in it, and it has never once been settled, because you kept trying to settle it by inventory, and inventory was always the wrong instrument.

Let me say one honest thing before the turn. You were never faithless for wondering. The customs are good. Keeping them was not a failure and I am not going to take one blue plate off your table. The customs were simply never able to answer the question you were asking them, and nobody told you that, and that is on the ones who taught, not on the one who kept asking. The Holy Spirit has been answering it another way the whole time, out of what God has already written.

The question has no verdict to hand down over you, because the verdict came in at the cross and it came in first. Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes His written word live in the room you are sitting in tonight.