The First Thing She Said

Rafa waited until the plates were being changed, which was a tactical decision, because in that family the only quiet gap is between courses.

There were fourteen at the table under the vine at the back, and two more coming later, and a small child asleep on a pile of coats.

He said it standing up, holding a serving spoon he had not meant to still be holding. He said: they took the apartment. It is ours. We sign on the ninth.

And the table did what that table does, which is to reach for a thing and take it apart with love and enormous speed.

His uncle wanted the street. His mother wanted the floor it was on and whether there was a lift. Somebody's cousin wanted to know what it had gone for and was told to mind his business by three people simultaneously. His sister was already saying she would do the kitchen. Two people were arguing about a van.

It was completely wonderful and it took about ninety seconds and by the end of it the apartment had been furnished, insured, painted, and given a housewarming date that nobody had cleared with Rafa.

And in the middle of that, his grandmother did not say anything.

She is eighty-eight and she does not hear well in a loud room and she has a habit of putting her hand flat on the table when she wants a second.

Rafa was looking at her because he had been watching to see if she had heard him. And what he saw was this: she closed her eyes for about three seconds and her mouth moved, and then she opened them and picked up the argument about the van, at volume, on the wrong side.

He asked her about it in the kitchen much later, carrying plates, when the noise was somebody else's problem.

He said, "Abuela, what did you say? At the table."

And she said, without looking up from the sink: "I told Him first. Then I told your uncle he was wrong about the van."

You have watched a table do that, or you have been the table. Good news arrives and within seconds it is being handled by everybody who loves you, and all of that is right and good and is what a family is for. And it may never have occurred to you that in the middle of all that noise, one person can do something upward that takes three seconds and costs nothing at all.

The First Words Out Of Her Mouth

There is a young woman in Luke who has just been handed the most enormous news anybody in Scripture receives, and Luke records what comes out of her first.

"And Mary said, My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my Saviour."Luke 1:46-47

That is her first move. Upward.

She is a young woman in an impossible position with an entire village's worth of complications ahead of her, and she has just walked into a house and been greeted, and the first thing she does with all of it is turn it upward.

She is not a distant figure here and she is not the point of the paragraph. She is a person doing something anybody can do, and Scripture put her words down so that ordinary people would have them.

You are being shown a first move rather than a standard. Luke 1 records a response and never once turns it into a requirement, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a young woman's sentence and puts it into an eighty-eight year old at a loud table under a vine.

And look at the verb. Magnify. Not add to. You cannot make God bigger. To magnify is to make something look its actual size to the person doing the looking, which means that the first move upward is not for God's benefit at all. It is what puts the thing in proportion for the one saying it.

You have a way of seeing the size of what has happened, and it takes about three seconds. That is what the written word does with a first response, and it is the Spirit of God who prompts it in a person, usually in the middle of a room where nobody would notice.

The Table Is Not The Problem

Now say the guard early, because this is exactly the article that gets misread.

Nothing about that table was wrong. The uncle and the street and the argument about the van are not a lesser form of joy that a more spiritual person would rise above. That is a family loving somebody at speed and it is one of the best things human beings do.

The grandmother did not withdraw from it. She was back in the van argument within four seconds and she was on the wrong side and she was enjoying herself.

There is no ranking here. This is not a page about telling God before you tell your mother, and if you announce your news to fourteen people and never say a word upward, nothing anywhere is recorded against you.

You are not being asked to be quieter or holier at your own table. It is written that a merry heart does good like a medicine, which puts the noise and the arguing firmly on the side of the good, and His Spirit is the one who is in a loud kitchen just as much as in a quiet one.

And say it flat, the way this site says everything. Nothing on this page asks anything of you. No order, no words, no proportion, no practice, and nothing routed to any person, cause or work anywhere at all, this one included. You are as fully His halfway through an argument about a van, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this from becoming a rule about table manners.