Grace Before The Meal And Not The Work

Daniel has said grace before dinner every night for twenty years. Not a long one. Four or five seconds, hands still, everyone waiting, and then the forks.

He learned it from his father, who learned it from his, and he has never missed it, not on holiday, not in a car park with fish and chips on his knees, not on the night his mother died.

Some evenings his hand is still cold from the walk in from the van. Some evenings he has been sitting down since half past seven that morning and the ache is behind his eyes rather than in his back. Either way he says the same four seconds over the plate.

And here is the thing he has never noticed, the way you never notice a doorframe you walk through eleven times a day.

He blesses the food. He has never blessed the day that bought it.

Nine hours of his life go past between the alarm and that table. Nine hours of thinking hard, and getting things right, and getting one thing wrong and going back to it, and holding his tongue when he wanted to say something, and doing the last part properly when nobody would have known. And none of that has ever had a word said over it. Not once in twenty years.

It is not that he thinks God dislikes it. It has simply never come up. The nine hours are what he does. The four seconds are what he believes.

I would guess you have your own version. There is something in your week you would call sacred without hesitating, and there is the great bulk of your actual life, the part you are inside right now, and you would not use that word about it, and you have never really thought about why not.

The first man God ever filled

I want to put a sentence in front of you that has been in the Bible your whole life, and I would like you to read it slowly, because the surprise is in who it is about.

And I have filled him with the Spirit of God, in wisdom, and in understanding, and in knowledge, and in all manner of workmanship.Exodus 35:31

The first person Scripture says God filled with His Spirit is not a prophet. Not a priest, not a king, and not somebody who spoke for a living. It is a man who made things: metal, stone, timber, cloth. God names him. God fills him. And the thing God fills him for is the work of his hands.

That is not a poetic reading of the verse. It is the plain sense of it, and it has been sitting there in the middle of the book you say grace out of.

You have a working life the Spirit of God has already been named over. Exodus 35:31 puts the Spirit of God on a craftsman for wisdom and understanding and knowledge in workmanship, and the same Holy Spirit does not go quiet between the alarm and the plate.

Notice what God does not say about him, because that is where most of us have quietly gone wrong. He does not say Bezalel is filled so that he will one day speak. He does not say the craft is a doorway to something more spiritual, or a way to be near people, or a testimony waiting to happen. He says: filled, for the making. The making is the thing.

So the nine hours were never a corridor between two doors. They are a room, and the room has been occupied the whole time.

I say the blessings, in my house, in the old words, several times a day. Over bread. Over wine. Over washing the hands. And the thing those blessings are for is not to make an ordinary thing holy. It is to notice out loud that it already came from Somewhere. That is a very different action and it changes what you are doing when you do it.

You are not asked to make your work sacred. You are asked to notice that it already came from His hand. The written word says the Spirit of God gave the wisdom and the understanding and the knowledge for the workmanship, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a fact about a Tuesday rather than a fact about a chapter.

Take the honest half of it too. Some of what you did today was tedious, and some of it you did badly, and some of it will be undone by somebody else within the year. None of that is being painted over. The offering is not the quality. Grace over a plate does not depend on the cooking.

And there is one thing here that nobody else can do on your behalf, and it is small and it is not a feeling. The sentence has to actually be said. Over the actual work. In the room where it happens.