The Prayer At The End Of The Bed

His father prayed over him every night of his childhood, in Spanish, at the end of the bed, and he can still do the whole thing from memory including the pause in the middle.

His own children are eleven and eight.

He has never once prayed with them at bedtime. Not once. Not a single night in eleven years.

He is not an absent father. That is what makes this so odd from the outside and so obvious from the inside. He does homework. He does the swimming on a Saturday, both of them, two hours, in a hot room with bad chairs. He knows the name of every child in his daughter's class and which two are trouble.

He simply cannot get from the doorway to the end of the bed.

He has thought about it more times than he could count. Usually in the corridor, with the light off behind him, having just said goodnight. He stands there for a second. And then he thinks: not tonight, they are tired, and it would be strange now, after eleven years, to suddenly start.

That last piece is the trap. Every year it gets truer. Every year the starting gets more conspicuous, because a thing you have never done becomes an announcement the first time you do it.

And underneath all of it is a picture he has never examined. In the picture, praying with your children is what his father did: in Spanish, formal, three or four minutes, at the end of the bed, with his hand on your head. That is the shape in his mind. That is what the thing is.

He does not speak Spanish well enough. He does not know three minutes of prayer by heart. So he stands in the corridor, every night, eleven years deep, and does nothing.

When thou liest down

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy about how a household carries the word of God, and everybody remembers that it is about teaching children and nobody remembers the venue.

And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.Deuteronomy 6:7

Take that in the corridor with the light off behind you. You are already appointed to this and no preparation is outstanding. The word puts the teaching in the doorway and the road, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries eleven words across a threshold.

Sitting in the house. Walking on the road. Lying down. Getting up.

There is no altar in that verse. No hour is named. Nobody kneels. It is a description of the ordinary geography of a day, and the instruction is to let the word be spoken across it, in the doorway, in the car, at the sink, at the light switch.

The formal version your father did was a beautiful thing and it was one way of obeying that verse. It was never the verse.

So take this in your corridor, and know it is not my reassurance, it is what is written: you are already the one appointed to do this, right now, tonight, without preparation. His word says talk of them when thou liest down, and it is the Holy Spirit who carries eleven ordinary words through a doorway, not the length of them and not the language they are in.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he had not wanted to attend, and who wrote that his heart was strangely warmed, and who then built a timetable that outlived him by three hundred years.

Here is the piece of it for a man in a corridor. The practices were small on purpose.

He built things that a servant girl with fourteen hours of work and no candles could keep. Short readings. A handful of plain questions asked out loud. Meetings at a fixed hour with six people in them. Nothing in the whole apparatus required an educated man with a quiet study, because the people it was for did not have one.

The nickname was somebody's mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was true.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the method survived because it was built small enough for the worst evening of the year.