The Only Believer At The Family Meal

His mother calls it his phase and she has been calling it that for nine years.

She does not mean it cruelly. That is the difficult part. She says it the way you would talk about a diet, or somebody's interest in cycling: warm, tolerant, faintly amused, and completely certain that it is going to pass.

Nine years. He came to faith at thirty one, in a hospital corridor, for reasons he has told about four people in his life.

At the family meals it works like this. Nobody is hostile. Somebody will say, at some point, that he cannot have the wine now, and he will say he can and does, and somebody else will make the joke about him praying over the potatoes, and everyone will laugh including him because it is genuinely a bit funny.

And then the conversation moves on, and the largest thing that has ever happened to him sits there under the table for four hours, being a phase.

You know that word. Yours might be different: a hobby, a moment, a thing you will grow out of. Somewhere there is a room where the biggest fact about you has been filed under something small.

Say what nine years of that costs

Nobody in that family has counted it, so let us.

It costs him the whole subject. He has never once been able to say anything real about it at that table, so nine years of the most significant thing in his life has happened entirely outside his family, which for a man who loves his family is a strange amputation.

It costs him the hospital corridor, which he has told four people about, none of whom are related to him.

And it costs him a small ongoing decision at every meal about whether to be slightly smaller, which he takes, every time, because the alternative is a conversation nobody in that room wants and he is not going to make his mother do it over a roast.

You have been keeping the largest thing about you under a table for nine years, and God has never once treated it as a phase. Psalm 139:16 says His book had your days written before there were any of them, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes written off a page and puts it in a family kitchen at three in the afternoon. There is nothing provisional on His side of this.

I have chosen you out of the world

There is one line built for a man being tolerated at a roast.

If you were of the world, the world would love his own: but because you are not of the world, but I have chosen you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.John 15:19

Now, let the Holy Spirit slow you down before you flinch at that word hates, because his family does not hate him and he will refuse the verse if it is handed to him carelessly. What that word covers is a whole range, and at the mild end of the range is being warmly and permanently misfiled by people who love you.

But look at the clause in the middle, because that is the one for him. I have chosen you out of the world. Chosen, past tense, completed, and out of, which means the strangeness at that table is not evidence that something has gone wrong. It is evidence of a relocation that already happened, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes chosen land on a man passing a dish.

You were chosen out, deliberately, and the not fitting is a consequence of a decision rather than a failure of one. That is not a way of making a man feel superior at his own mother's table. The written word puts the choosing before the strangeness in the order of the sentence, and the Spirit is the one who makes chosen something a man can carry into a kitchen without needing anybody to agree.

And I want to be careful, because this site would be a cruelty otherwise. Nothing here promises you that your family will come round, and I am not going to tell you that your nine years are a strategy God is running on them. They are not a technique and neither are you.

What this does not change

The word phase will be used again. Probably at Easter. This article does not stop your mother saying it and there is no sentence here that will.

What can change is what the word lands on. At the moment it lands on a man who is quietly, privately, still slightly wondering whether nine years counts as long enough to be sure. There is somewhere else for it to land.

You have been chosen out rather than gone through something, and that was settled in a corridor nine years ago and before it. John 15:19 puts the choosing as completed action, and His Spirit is the one who turns a written line into ground under a man at a family table.

One plain sentence before we go on. If being the only one has gone somewhere heavier, if there are hours where carrying on is genuinely a question, please tell one real human being today, and if it is urgent, call your doctor or a crisis line before you tell anybody in the family. That is not a failure of faith. That is God sending help with a face on it, and reaching for it is obedience rather than collapse.