Nobody Asks You Over

The porch faces west, which was the whole reason for the porch, and at about eight o'clock in July the light comes up under the roof and turns everything the color of weak tea.

The phone is face down on the arm of the chair. It has been face down for a while now. You turned it over at some point last winter because you got tired of the little jump your chest was doing every time it lit up with a delivery notification, and you never turned it back.

Here is the arithmetic, and you have done it more than once, which is the embarrassing part.

Two years. Two years since anybody said, come on over, we're doing ribs. Two years since a Saturday had a shape somebody else put in it.

And you were the one who did the hosting. That is the part that sits crooked. Eleven years the group met at your place. You put the leaf in the table every single time and you got good at the fifteen minutes before, the ice and the extra chair and the dog put out. When Bill took the transfer and it all wound up, there were four separate conversations in the parking lot about how somebody would get something going again in the fall.

Nobody did. Not out of coldness. Everybody is just tired and the calendars closed over the hole like water.

So you eat standing up at the counter now, mostly, because sitting down at a table by yourself has a particular sound to it. You have gotten efficient. Eight minutes, plate in the sink, and on with the evening.

And what you would not say out loud to one living soul is this: somewhere in the second year you quietly changed your mind about yourself. You did not decide that people are unkind. You decided that you are the kind of man people are fond of and do not think of. Which is a much heavier sentence than the first one, and you have been carrying it around the yard all summer.

I came about a table. Not the group. A table.

What they did on the mountain when the oath was finished

At Sinai, after the words are spoken and the oath is cut and everything is settled between God and that nation, something happens that people skim right past because it sounds ordinary.

Moses goes up the mountain. So does Aaron, and two of his sons, and seventy of the elders. Seventy four men climbing a hill.

And at the top, in the open, in the presence of God, they sit down and they eat and they drink.

Stay with that a moment, because everything in you expects a different ending to that sentence. They saw God, and He did not lay a hand on them, and what they did in front of Him was have a meal. That is how a covenant was closed in that world. Not with a filing. With food. Two parties who had sworn an oath sat down together and ate, and the eating was the public proof that the thing was done and the two sides were now at one table.

A meal was the signature.

Now hear that where you live, because it is yours and it has nothing to do with your calendar. You have a seat at a table that was set on the far end of an oath, and you were seated there by the covenant and not by anybody's July plans. Scripture puts seventy four men on a mountain eating in front of God, and the Spirit of God is not showing you that as a curiosity from a long time ago. He is showing you where your chair is.

The guest list nobody ever wrote

And then look at what the prophet sees coming, because this is where the whole business gets almost funny.

And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.Isaiah 25:6

Read the phrase in the middle. Unto all people.

There is no list. There is no round of texts going out to the ones who get asked and quietly not going out to you. That is the thing about a feast God makes: it is not built out of who thought of whom, which is exactly the machinery that has been grinding you down on this porch for two years.

So take the width of that phrase at full size, because it is the width of your own standing. You are already inside the words all people, and you were inside them through the whole of the second year, while the calendars were quietly closing over the hole. Isaiah 25:6 is where that width is written down, and the Spirit is pressing it in at the exact place the arithmetic has been running.

And I want to be careful here, because I am not handing you a spiritual substitute for a friend's kitchen. Wanting to be asked over is not a weakness in you. It is right, and it is good, and God made you for it, and it is worth asking Him for straight out.

But while you wait for that, hear the thing that is settled. You have been eating in company all this time. You are seated at a table you did not have to be remembered onto, and Isaiah 25:6 is where it is written down, and the Holy Spirit is the One in the kitchen with you at the counter at ten past six, not as an idea but as the second person in the room.

Eight minutes at the counter

So let us talk about the counter, because that is where you actually live and I am not going to give you a mountain and leave you standing up eating over the sink.

A man eating alone at his own counter is being eaten with. That is not a nice thought to make the evening go easier. It is the plain consequence of what a covenant meal is: the two parties are at one table now, and only one of them ever needed reminding.

What that changes is the eight minutes.

The eight minutes has been a way of getting through something. It can be the exact opposite starting tonight, and nothing about the room has to change, and nobody has to be invited. You sit down. You put the plate on a table instead of a counter. You say one sentence out loud to the One who is there. And then you eat slowly, like a man at a table with company, because that is the literal fact of the situation.

You have a Host tonight, and you were never once the one who had to do the hosting in this arrangement, and that is written into the whole shape of the meal on that mountain. The Spirit is the One making that land as a fact instead of as a comfort, and He is patient about it, so let it take the whole meal.