Which Bit Do You Like Best

The box lives on top of the wardrobe for fifty-one weeks of the year, and on the fifty-second he brings the ladder in from the shed and gets it down.

Twelve lanterns. The hooks are already in the fence rail and he put them there himself a long time ago, marked out with a pencil so the spacing is even along the whole run, because uneven spacing is the kind of thing that catches your eye all evening and nobody can ever say why.

The trestles come out of the garage in the same order they went in. The long cloth. The good chairs at the far end where the ground is level and the folding ones nearer the house. He knows who sits where and he has never written it down, and if you asked him he would say it is not a seating plan, it is just that some people like the end near the kitchen.

Nobody in that family has ever had to ask whether it is happening. It happens. It has happened every year for a very long time, and it is always right, and the reason it is always right is that he has never once let it not be.

This year he is on the ladder with the last lantern and a child is sitting on the back step with her chin on her knees, watching him, the way children watch a person doing a job they cannot help with.

"Which bit do you like best?"

He says, "It is all good."

And you heard yourself say it.

You were still holding the lantern. The sentence was true and it was kind and it was not an answer to the question, and the child accepted it immediately because children accept the tone rather than the words, and she went off to find somebody else.

And you stayed up the ladder a moment longer than the job required.

Because you have not missed one. Not one, in all these years. Every feast, every gathering, every one of the days that matter in this family, kept properly, kept on time, kept by you. And standing on the third rung with a hook in your hand you could not remember the last time you enjoyed a single one of them.

Somebody at that table is glad, and it is not being asked of you

Let me start where you actually are rather than where a message like this usually starts.

Nothing on this page is going to tell you to cheer up. Nobody is going to hand a man who has kept every feast for years one more thing to keep, and if what is sitting underneath this is a tiredness that a good afternoon does not touch, then hear it plainly: there is no verse anywhere in the book that fines a man for being tired, and gladness is not being demanded of you here.

What is going to happen is much smaller. We are going to look at who in that garden is actually doing the rejoicing.

The LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy; he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.Zephaniah 3:17

Read the subject of every verb in it. He is mighty. He saves. He rejoices. He rests. He sings. In an entire verse about joy the reader is not once the source of it. The reader is the object. The one thing the reader does in that sentence is be rejoiced over.

You are the one being sung over at your own table, and that has never depended on how the evening feels to you. Zephaniah 3:17 puts every verb of gladness on God's side of the sentence and leaves the reader standing in the middle of it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who takes a line written to a worn out people and lands it on a man holding a lantern on a ladder.

Now the Hebrew, because there is something in it worth having. The phrase rendered he will rest in his love uses the ordinary verb for going quiet. He will be silent in His love. And the line immediately after it is the loud one, the joy that breaks out in singing.

So the order in the verse is this: He is quiet over you, and then He sings. Not the other way round. The God in the middle of that garden is not standing there waiting for the host to look like he is enjoying himself. He goes quiet in His love first, the way people do with somebody they know is tired, and the singing comes out of the quiet.

Joy is fruit, and fruit is grown

Here is the category error that has been costing you, and it is an honest one made by a reliable man.

Somewhere along the way, enjoyment got filed with the other things on the list. Lanterns, trestles, cloth, seating, and somewhere near the bottom, feel something. And once it is on the list it is your output, and once it is your output it can be done badly, and a man who does things properly will not risk doing a thing badly in front of people he loves. So he does not attempt it. He gets the spacing right instead, because the spacing can be got right.

You have a joy that is grown in you rather than produced by you. Galatians 5:22 calls it the fruit of the Spirit, and fruit is the one thing on a farm that nobody manufactures, and the verse names the Spirit as the one who grows it, so it was never sitting on your list beside the trestles.

Fruit takes a season. Fruit takes rain that nobody organized. Nobody has ever stood in an orchard and applied effort to a branch. The whole of the farmer's work is around the tree and none of it is inside the fruit, and the difference between those two things is most of what has gone wrong in your Septembers.

And you are not the one holding this together. Zephaniah 3:17 says the LORD thy God in the midst of thee is mighty, and the might named in that sentence is standing in the middle of the gathering rather than resting on the man with the ladder, and the Spirit is the one who makes that stop being a comfort and start being a fact about your garden.

I am not going to hand you a practice. You keep things beautifully. Keeping is not the part that is missing, and adding another observance to the calendar of a man who has never missed one would be a strange kind of help.

You have permission to like one thing out loud. Scripture says go thy way, eat thy bread with joy, in Ecclesiastes 9:7, and the sentence is an invitation rather than an instruction with a standard attached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man who has spent years saying it is all good able to say one particular thing instead.