Alternate Wednesdays, Two Portions of Chips

You have got the flat right. That took about eight months and you are quietly proud of it.

There is a proper bed in his room now, not the folding one. There is a shelf with three of his things on it, put there by him, which took until March. There is a decent chair and there is a table with two chairs at it that you bought specifically so that there would be a table with two chairs at it.

He comes every other Wednesday, from about half four to about half eight, and Sunday afternoons in the other week, which is a different problem.

Wednesdays you get chips, because it is the one thing he reliably wants, and you have stopped pretending you are going to cook on a Wednesday.

And you sit at that table, opposite each other, with two open boxes, and it is quiet.

Not hostile. He is not sulking and you are not lecturing and it is nothing like the first six months, which were a great deal worse. He answers. He shows you things on his phone sometimes, which you have learned to receive properly.

It is just that neither of you has ever known what to do with the sitting-down part, and so about eleven minutes of every fortnight are spent with two men chewing and the extractor fan going.

You have started dreading it slightly. Not him coming. Not him going, though that is its own thing. The eleven minutes.

Two men ate at a border and stayed the night

Sit still a minute. I am not going to tell you to ask him about school.

You have already been doing the thing that passage records, every other Wednesday, for eight months. That is what is written about two men who had settled precisely nothing between them, and the Spirit has been at that table for every one of those meals whether or not anybody said so.

Let me say the true thing first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit is not in the business of grading a separated father: what you have built in eight months is not nothing. A bed, a shelf, a table with two chairs, and a boy who puts his own things on the shelf. That is a great deal of quiet work and nobody has thanked you for it. Nobody in that flat is on trial, and neither is his mother, and I am not going to make her part of this.

But you have named the eleven minutes, so come and look at two men who ate a meal at a very bad moment and did not do it well either.

Then Jacob offered sacrifice upon the mount, and called his brethren to eat bread: and they did eat bread, and tarried all night in the mount.Genesis 31:54

That is Jacob and Laban. Father-in-law and son-in-law, twenty years of grievance, a chase across a country, an accusation of theft, a heap of stones piled up as a boundary marker with an agreement that neither would cross it to harm the other.

And then, having settled precisely nothing about how they feel, they eat together. And then they stay the night.

Read it again, because the strangeness of it is the point. They do not reconcile emotionally. There is no scene. There is a hard border and a meal on it and two men who stayed in the same place until morning, and heaven wrote it down as a good thing.

A meal does not require two people to be easy with each other, and God has never once made ease the entry requirement. That is not me making a small thing large for a man with a takeaway. That is what the passage records those two men doing and in what condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a table with two chairs at it.

Here is what nobody explains about saying something over food. When you speak over that meal, you are not making it heavy and you are not asking your son to participate in anything. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about His own provision. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. It takes six seconds and he does not have to respond to it.

One sentence out loud on a Wednesday is a whole blessing, and eleven quiet minutes with something said over them is a different eleven minutes. Scripture says every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), and there is no clause in it about the conversation, and the Spirit is the one who makes that live in a room rather than merely be correct in a book.

What the eleven minutes actually is

Now let me name the thing properly, because I think you have been diagnosing it as a relationship problem and I do not think it is one. What is written diagnoses it differently, and the Spirit is not accusing either of you.

A fifteen year old boy and his father, in a flat, in a situation neither of them chose, do not have a shared vocabulary for sitting still opposite each other. Everything else you do together has an activity in it. The car has a road. The phone has a thing on it. The walk has a direction.

The table has nothing. It is the only eleven minutes in the fortnight with no task in it, which is exactly why it is hard and exactly why it matters.

What is written offers a different kind of sentence for a room like that, and the Spirit has never needed a conversation to work in one. You have been treating it as a gap to be filled with conversation, and conversation is horizontal, and the two of you are not currently very good at horizontal, and neither of you should be blamed for that.

A blessing is not horizontal. It comes down over the pair of you, and it does not require him to say anything back, and that is why it fits in a room where talking does not.

That is not a technique and I will not sell it as one. What is written never once required two people to be comfortable before a word was worth saying over them. The Spirit is not waiting for the two of you to be easy.

God is at that table on a Wednesday, and He does not attend it less because it is a fortnightly table with chips on it. It is written that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there am I in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20), and He set the number at two on purpose, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in that flat between half four and half eight, which is why it reads as a fact about the room and not as consolation.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to make Wednesdays into something, or to have a conversation, or to explain to a fifteen year old why you are doing anything. Nothing here is a program. If you say it once and he says nothing and you never do it again, it was still said.

What you say over two boxes of chips is a real thing, and it is not a lesser version of a family saying grace. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a boy looking at his phone cannot make it less true over his own supper.