Every Word Of Their Prayer

The extension cord runs the whole length of the hall floor under a strip of silver tape, and by now everybody steps over it without looking, including the children, including the man carrying the cake.

Folding chairs, ninety of them, and one of his has a wobble he has been managing all afternoon by keeping his weight to the left. Behind a curtain at the back, a chest freezer clicks on and hums for about four minutes and clicks off again, and it has been doing that all day and it is the sound he will remember this wedding by.

His niece got married at two. She is twenty three and she looked at the ceiling for a second before she said her part, which is a thing she has done since she was small, and it undid him completely and he covered it well.

Now they are at the part after the food. Plates going hand to hand down the long table. Somebody's paper cup of punch on the windowsill, forgotten, going warm.

And the groom's family is the other kind.

He would not have said it out loud, but he had it filed. The loud ones. The hands up ones. The ones whose services he had spent eleven years being able to explain exactly why he was not part of, with reasons, in order, and the reasons were not stupid reasons. He came today for his niece. He has been perfectly pleasant. He has also been counting the ways this room is not his room since he walked into it.

Then the groom's grandmother stands up.

She does not ask for quiet. The room gives it to her, which tells you something about the room. She puts one hand on the shoulder of the bride and one on the shoulder of the groom, and she starts to pray over them, out loud, in front of everybody, in the way she has clearly done a thousand times.

And about thirty seconds in, he becomes aware that his own mouth is moving.

Not because he memorized this. Because it is the same prayer. Underneath the volume and the manner and every difference he had catalogued, it is the same prayer, word for word, that his own grandmother said over him at a kitchen table in a different decade in a completely different accent, and he has not thought about that kitchen table in years and he is thinking about it now.

He does not raise his hands. That is not his and it is not going to become his in a rented hall on a Saturday. He just stands there at the end of a row of folding chairs, with the freezer humming behind the curtain and the tape holding the cord down across the floor, mouthing every word of a prayer said by people he had decided were nothing like him.

The prayer underneath the prayer

There is a thing that happens to a person who has been in an argument for a long time. The differences get sharper and the shared ground goes invisible, not because it left, but because you stopped needing to look at it. Nobody surveys the ground they are standing on. They survey the fence.

So you can spend eleven years describing, accurately, why you are not in that room, and never once notice that the whole argument was taking place on a floor you both were standing on the entire time.

You are standing on held ground right now, tonight, more of it than you have counted, and this is not my optimism. It is what the Lord was asking for out loud in John 17:21, that they all may be one, and He prayed that before you or that grandmother or anybody in the hall existed, and it is His Spirit that presses that prayer on your chest this evening instead of letting it sit in a chapter.

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also which shall believe on me through their word; That they all may be one; as thou, Father, art in me, and I in thee, that they also may be one in us: that the world may believe that thou hast sent me."John 17:20-21, KJV

Now let me be careful, because there is a cheap version of this message and it does real damage.

The cheap version says the differences do not matter. It does not say that here. Those differences are real. Some of them cost people something. Some of them are the reason certain rooms are not your room, and pretending they dissolve over a paper cup of punch would be its own kind of verdict, handed down by a website that has never met you. This page will not settle one disputed thing, tonight or ever.

What it will say is this. The differences are real and they are not the floor.

You have more held in common than the last few years let you see, and that is not sentiment: what is written puts the oneness inside the Father and the Son before it says one word about the people, and your mouth was moved on somebody else's prayer by His Spirit before your opinions had time to object.

Think about what happened at that end of the row. Your theology did not change. Your reasons did not evaporate. Your mouth simply got there first, and your mouth knew the prayer, and the reason your mouth knew the prayer is that it was given to both families out of the same word.

You were handed something in common and you were handed it a long time ago, before you had a position on anything, because He promised oneness and prayed it in front of witnesses, and the same Spirit who carried that prayer through a grandmother's hands tonight has been carrying it in you the whole time you were counting the ways this room was not yours.

That is not a small thing to find out at a wedding. That is a wall coming down while you are holding a plate.