Eating Alone In A New Town

The room over the hardware shop had a window that looked down onto the crossroads, and by the second week she had learned the whole rhythm of it. Bakery van at ten past six. The man with the two dogs at half seven. The school run backing up at the lights and clearing by nine.

She had moved for good reasons. Every single one of them was a good reason, and she would say so if you asked, and they were still good at the end of the month and at the end of the year. That was the strange part. Nothing had gone wrong.

She ate standing up.

Not deliberately. It just happened that when you are one person, a plate at a table looks like a small ceremony you cannot quite justify, so you eat at the counter with your hip against the drawer and your eyes on the window, and it takes four minutes, and then there is the plate and the fork and the rest of the evening.

The thing that finally got to her was not the evenings. It was a Tuesday in the cafe on the corner when the woman ahead of her got as far as "morning" and the girl behind the counter already had the cup under the machine, because she knew. That was all. Somebody knew what somebody else liked.

Nobody in that town knew what she liked. Not maliciously. There had simply not been enough Tuesdays yet, and there might never be, and she stood in the queue behind a stranger's coffee and felt the whole size of it.

Now come and stand in that queue, because you are in it.

Maybe you moved for a job, or for a parent who needed you, or away from something you were right to leave. Maybe you did not move at all and the town emptied out around you instead. Either way you eat alone, and you have got efficient at it, and you have told yourself it is fine because it genuinely is fine, and there is still a small thing that goes through you at the sound of somebody's usual being made without them having to ask.

There is a fire already lit on a shore, and there is food on it, and it was cooking before anybody got there.

The meal was not the party afterwards

Here is a scene almost nobody has been shown, and it changes what a table is.

Two parties cut an oath. The serious part is done, the words are said, the thing is sworn. And then, always, without exception, they sit down on the ground and they eat together. Bread is torn, not sliced. Salt goes onto it. They eat out of the same dish, and from that afternoon the two households are one thing.

Now, the meal was not the celebration at the end. The meal was part of how it became binding. In that world nobody sat down and ate with a person they were merely tolerating. Food went into your body and became your body, and eating from one dish said something so plain it needed no explanation: what is mine is now yours, and I will not turn on a person I have eaten with.

So when the elders climb the mountain in Exodus and the covenant is cut, look at what the text bothers to record.

Also they saw God, and did eat and drink.Exodus 24:11

They did not have a service. They had lunch, and the lunch was the point.

You are in covenant with a God who ratifies things at a table, and you were brought into that arrangement before anybody in your new town had learned your face. That is not a warm sentiment I am pushing across the counter at you: the word puts the eating right inside the swearing, and the Holy Spirit is taking that shared dish on a mountainside and setting it down in a room over a hardware shop.

The fire that was already burning

Then there is a morning on a beach, and it is the plainest picture in the book.

Seven men have been out all night and caught nothing. They are wet, they are tired in that particular way that makes people short with each other, and they are coming in with an empty boat, which is the shape of a wasted night in any century. And as the light comes up they can see something on the shingle.

Somebody has lit a fire. There is fish on it already, and bread.

He did not send them out for supplies. He did not wait to see if they had anything to contribute, which they did not, having caught nothing all night. The coals were going before the boat touched.

Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine.John 21:12

Three words. Not let us discuss last week. Not explain yourselves. Come and eat, the food is ready, sit down on the stones.

You have a standing invitation to a meal you did not cook and did not pay for, and it is not a reward that arrives after you have sorted your life out. John 21:12 has the fire lit before the men are ashore, and His Spirit is the one who keeps that fire in the present tense, this evening, in your kitchen, with whatever is actually in the fridge.

Nobody is asking you to have people over

Let me say the thing that needs saying, because this is where articles about the table usually let a person down.

Nothing here requires you to join anything, host anything, or arrive somewhere on a Sunday with a dish. Nothing here is about a household. A great deal of writing about God's table quietly assumes a full house and a long table and children, and a person eating alone in a rented room reads it and feels further out than they did before they started.

That is not this. The invitation on the shore went to seven men who had nothing to bring, in the open air, before breakfast. A person eating alone is not eating alone: a person eating alone is being eaten with.

You are being sat with tonight, and you were sat with last night when it did not occur to you to notice. Scripture ties the meal to the oath, and the Holy Spirit does not observe from the corner of the room while you stand at the counter. He is the company.

And there is your part in it, because a covenant is not nothing asked of anybody. God's side is the invitation, and He has issued it and does not withdraw it. Your side is to accept it in the ordinary way people accept invitations: by turning up. By sitting down. By eating like somebody who was expected.