When Thou Sittest In Thine House

The car is where it happens and it has been the car for about eleven years.

Twenty-two minutes each way, and the second half of the morning drive is genuinely the best of him. He talks out loud. He argues, sometimes. He has said things in that car he has never said anywhere and would not know how to say in a building.

And then he pulls in, and he goes to work, and he comes home, and in his own house he says grace before dinner in the way you do, which takes eleven seconds and has not changed in a decade, and that is the whole of it.

Never at the table. Never in the front room. Never once out loud with his wife present, in eleven years of marriage, in a house where they get on well and talk about everything else.

He has never examined why, because it has never presented itself as a decision. But if you pushed him he would get to it, and it is this: the car is a place where nothing else happens, and his own table is where the actual life is, and the actual life feels too ordinary a thing to put in front of God.

If your praying lives in a vehicle, come and sit down. Nobody is going to take the drive off you.

The instruction names four places and one of them is a chair

Here is one of the most quoted verses in the Old Testament, and the useful part is the geography at the end of it.

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

Four locations. Read them.

When thou sittest in thine house. Sitting down at home. Not standing, not kneeling, not in a set-apart room. Sitting, in the place where you sit.

When thou walkest by the way. On the road. That is his twenty-two minutes and it is right there in the verse, and it is one of four rather than the only one.

When thou liest down, and when thou risest up. Going to bed and getting up. The two least ceremonial moments in a human day.

Not one of these is a religious location. There is no temple in that list, no altar, no set time. And notice which one comes first: the house, sitting down.

He has been doing one of the four faithfully for eleven years and reading the other three as unavailable.

You have three more places already open to you, and they were already named before the road was. Deuteronomy 6:7 is where that sits, in a list whose first item is a man sitting in his own house, and the same Spirit who moved Moses to put the chair before the road is the one who gets a man past his own kitchen door.

The ordinary is not a lesser location, it is the specified one

Now let me say the thing underneath, because his instinct is not stupid and it deserves a real answer.

He feels the car is appropriate because nothing else is competing there. It is empty time in a metal box, and giving that to God feels clean.

And the table feels wrong because the table has the actual weight of his life on it: the plates, the day his wife has had, the thing they are trying not to argue about, the bills in the drawer beside it. It feels presumptuous to bring God into that.

But read the verse again and see what it is actually about. It is instructions to a father, about children, at home, over daily life. It is not about a devotional practice at all. The whole thing is aimed at the exact material he thinks is too ordinary, and it names that material as the subject.

The car is not more suitable. The car is emptier, and empty is not the same word as holy, and he has been quietly confusing the two since he was thirty.

You are already permitted to bring Him the loaded table, and that was already the point of the instruction. He promised it, in the sentence about casting the whole of your care on Him because He cares for you, which is aimed at what is actually on a person (1 Peter 5:7), and His Spirit is not more comfortable in an empty room.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there is not going to be one here.

And nothing in this article asks anything of your wife or your household. Nobody has to change, nothing has to be organized, and this is not a proposal for family devotions that somebody else has to attend. If a practice puts a requirement on the people you live with, it is the wrong practice.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your wife is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is basic courtesy. None of it fails anything.

You have been fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your week allows. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God is not distributed by where anybody prays.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.