The Grandfather at the Quinceanera

The hall is full. Paper flowers on every table, a cake that took his daughter-in-law two days, and a sound system a nephew is in charge of and is taking very seriously.

And in the middle of it there is a fifteen-year-old girl in a dress that has been discussed in this family for four months, and every person in this room is looking at her.

That is what the evening is, and it is not a criticism of it. He has been to nine of these and loved every one, and there is nothing wrong with a family putting a girl in the center of a room and telling her she matters.

But he is seventy-four, and he is standing near the door with a glass of something, and he has been asked to say a few words in about twenty minutes, and he has been thinking about one thing all week.

Every single thing this room is telling her tonight is going to be true for about four hours.

She is going to be looked at, and admired, and told she is beautiful eighty times by people who mean it entirely. And on Tuesday she is at school in a hallway where nobody is looking at her at all, and in two years there are rooms where being looked at is not warm and is not from people who love her, and this hall will not be there.

And what he wants, standing near the door with twenty minutes to go, is to say something that is still standing on Tuesday. Something that does not stop being true when the room empties and the paper flowers go in a bag and nobody in the building is looking at her.

And every version he has drafted this week sounds like the other eighty things. You are beautiful. You are becoming a wonderful young woman. We are all so proud of you.

All of it true. All of it kind. And all of it, he suspects, gone by Tuesday.

And you know that hall. There is an occasion, and you have been given a few minutes at it, and you can feel that the room's vocabulary is not going to survive the week.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are the one in that room with something the room cannot say, and you have been all along. Psalm 139:16 says His eyes saw her substance before it was fashioned and every one of her days was written down, and the Holy Spirit is in this hall with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

An old man with his hands crossed

Come to a bedside in Egypt where a very old man is being brought two boys to bless, and watch what he actually says, because it is not what anybody in the room expected and the boys are barely in it.

He crosses his hands, which upsets their father. But listen to the blessing itself.

The God which fed me all my life long unto this day, The Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads.Genesis 48:15-16

Count how much of that is about the boys. Three words at the end. Bless the lads.

Everything before it is about who God has been to the old man. The God who fed me all my life long. The Angel who redeemed me from all evil. He is not describing the children. He is not listing their qualities or predicting their futures or telling them what they are becoming. He is testifying, at the end of a long and genuinely difficult life, about who walked with him, and then he asks that same God to bless two boys.

And that is a blessing that survives Tuesday, because it is not a description of a fifteen-year-old on a good night. It is a report from somebody who has been alive for seventy-four years about who God is, delivered over a girl, in front of her whole family.

You have seventy-four years of testimony and that is the thing the room cannot supply. The written word puts the blessing's whole weight on who God has been to the one speaking rather than on any quality of the ones being blessed, which means what you have to offer is exactly what nobody else at those tables can offer; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a hall with paper flowers on the tables.

And look at the word he uses about his own life. Redeemed me from all evil. This is a man who was cheated by his uncle, who buried a wife on a road, who spent twenty-two years believing his son was dead. He is not saying nothing bad happened. He is saying who was in it.

Why the room's vocabulary runs out

I want to be fair to the eighty compliments, because you are going to be tempted to be superior about them and they do not deserve it.

Everybody in that hall who tells her she is beautiful tonight means it and is doing a good thing. A girl should be celebrated. There is nothing corrosive about a family making a fuss.

The vocabulary runs out on Tuesday not because it is false but because it is descriptive, and a description is only as durable as the thing it describes. Tonight she is in a hall in a dress with the lights on her. On Tuesday she is not, and a sentence built on tonight has nothing to stand on.

A testimony does not have that problem. Who God was to a man across seventy-four years is not less true in a school hallway on a Tuesday morning than it is in a decorated hall on a Saturday night, and a fifteen-year-old can carry it into rooms where nobody is looking at her precisely because it was never about how she was being looked at.

You were not wrong to want to say something warm, and warmth is not the thing that runs out. Genesis 48:11 has the old man saying I had not thought to see thy face, and God hath shewed me also thy seed, which is a man astonished at his own life rather than one summing up a child; His Spirit is the one who kept him alive to say it, and He is not grading anybody's few words.

And here is the second half. You have been drafting all week and rejecting everything, and you have started to think you are not good with words. You are seventy-four and you have raised a family and buried people and kept a marriage and stayed in a church through two splits, and none of that is a language problem. What you have been missing is not eloquence. It is that you were looking for a sentence about her, and the thing you have is a sentence about Him.

You are not short of words, and the sentence you need is one you already know. Psalm 71:18 says now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation, and it is an old man's prayer about having enough time to hand something over; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who put you near that door with twenty minutes to go.

Twenty minutes

Here is the practical thing, and it is a relief.

Do not write a speech about her. You have nothing to say about a fifteen-year-old that eighty people will not have already said better and warmer by nine o'clock.

Say what God has been to you. One or two sentences. Concrete, not general: not God is good, but the God who kept this family through the year your grandmother was sick. The God who fed me all my life long. Say it as a report, because it is one.

And then ask Him to bless her. Three words at the end, exactly as the old man did.

That will take you about forty seconds and it will be the only thing said in that hall tonight that is still standing on Tuesday.

You have a testimony and twenty minutes and a room already listening. Scripture says the God which fed me all my life long unto this day, the Angel which redeemed me from all evil, bless the lads, and the pattern is testimony first and the child at the end; the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept you seventy-four years to be standing near that door tonight.

So the hall is not a room whose vocabulary runs out on Tuesday. It is a hall with paper flowers in it and an old man near the door who has the one thing that survives the week.

And a word for you rather than for them. If what sits under this is heavier than a page can carry, find a real person this week. If it has gone darker than tired, call or text 988 in the United States, at any hour.