The Fast I Broke at Noon

He said it on a Sunday, at the table, with everybody there.

His mother had come. His wife's brother had come, which meant it was a proper meal and there were too many dishes and somebody was going to have to eat standing up. The boys were being loud about football. And Rafiq put down his glass and said, in the voice a man uses when he has decided something in the night and wants it to be harder to undo, that for the next forty days he was going to fast, and this is what it would look like, and this is what he was asking God about.

It went well. His mother said may God accept it. His brother-in-law asked a practical question about the traveling. His wife looked at him across the table in a way he has thought about since. The boys asked whether it counted if you were at school.

Day one was fine. Day two was fine and he felt something like joy in it. He remembers day two.

Day three, at noon, he was alone in the kitchen.

He was not desperate. That is the part he cannot get past. He was not weak with hunger and he was not being tested by anything anyone would call a test. He was tired, and there was bread on the board from the morning, and there was honey in the dish beside it, and he stood at the counter and ate, on his feet, looking at the tiles.

It took less than a minute. Then he brushed the crumbs into his hand and put them in the bin and washed the plate that did not need washing.

Nobody ever asked him. That is the second thing. Not once, not his mother, not his wife, not one of the boys. Whether they forgot or whether they decided not to, he does not know and he will not ask. Forty days went by and the house never mentioned it and neither did he.

But something moved that afternoon and did not move back.

He used to say the blessing at that table. That was his. It had been his since his own father died and it was the one thing in the house that was unquestionably the father's job.

Now he passes it down. Ali, you say it tonight. Or he turns to his brother-in-law and lifts his chin at him, or he tells his wife to go ahead and start. He does it lightly, and everyone has got used to it, and it has been eight months.

He still prays. He prays in the car, on the road out past the depot, quite freely, sometimes out loud. He prays for the boys by name at a set of traffic lights he has prayed at so many times that his chest tightens a little when the light goes amber.

He does not pray in his own house.

And two weeks ago the younger boy, who is nine and who notices everything and understands none of it, looked up when the food came and said: Baba, why is it never you any more?

The verse was written in rubble

The two lines almost everybody can quote were not written by a man having a good year. They were written by a man sitting in the wreckage of a city that had gone as wrong as a place can go, in a book that is literally called Lamentations, in the middle of a chapter where he says he has been made to walk in darkness and not in light.

Right there, in the lowest part of the lowest book, this:

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22-23

Read the last three words again and notice whose faithfulness is being praised. Thy faithfulness. Not ours. Not mine. The whole sentence is about a supply that arrives from somewhere else, and the man writing it is in no position whatsoever to be claiming a good record.

You are held tonight by a faithfulness with somebody else's name on it, and you were held by it at noon on the third day while you stood at the counter looking at the tiles. Scripture says His compassions fail not, and the Holy Spirit is the one pressing that into a man who has been quietly assuming the opposite for eight months.

New every morning means the supply is not indexed to yesterday

Here is the mechanism in the verse, and it is worth slowing down for.

New every morning. Mercy is issued fresh at dawn, the way manna was, and manna is exactly what the phrase is built on: you could not keep it overnight, you could not stockpile it, and it came again the next day for people who had grumbled the day before and would grumble again the day after.

Which means the morning after Rafiq stood at that counter, mercy came out new. Not reduced. Not on probation. Not with a note attached about the third day.

There is nothing in the text about a sliding scale, and there is nothing anywhere in Scripture that makes the morning's mercy a payment for the previous day's performance, because the moment it becomes a payment it stops being mercy and becomes wages, and Paul spends whole chapters refusing to let anybody do that with it.

You have been given a fresh issue every single morning of those eight months, including the mornings you handed the blessing down the table, and that is what is written and it is His Spirit who makes it more than a nice line on a calendar.

What you broke, and what you did not

Now the plain distinction, which is the whole article.

Rafiq broke his own word. That is real and it should not be dressed up. He said a thing in front of his family and he did not do it, and the discomfort he has been carrying is not a malfunction, it is a conscience working properly, and a man with no discomfort at all would be in a far worse position than he is.

But look at what he has done with it. He has treated his broken word as though it were God's covenant that had cracked, and it was not. The covenant did not develop a fault at noon on a Tuesday. It has not been renegotiated, downgraded, suspended, or put under review. It is not something that can break, because the One who swore it swore it on Himself, and Rafiq was never one of the load bearing walls.

And I will say the other half once, warmly, because it is true and because leaving it out would be a kind of flattery. None of this makes what you do irrelevant. Your yes should be yes. Go and keep the next thing you say. But you keep it as a son who is already at the table, never as a man buying his way back to it, and there is a whole world of difference between those two men even though from the outside they are doing the same thing.

You are inside a covenant you did not build and therefore cannot demolish, and the word is what says so, and His Spirit is the witness of it living in you rather than a feeling you have to work up.