The Microwave At Twenty Past Six

The kitchen is not big enough for a table, which Marion has always said is a mercy, because it means there is nothing to lay.

Three minutes, twenty seconds. The plate turns and the hum starts, and she leans against the worktop and looks out at the yard going blue, and the light from the little window in the door swings round and round across her hands.

It is always twenty past six. Not because she chose twenty past six. It is simply when the thing is hot.

There are four meals in the rotation and she is not ashamed of any of them. Wednesday is the fish one. She eats standing up, at the counter, with the radio going quietly because the flat is loud when it is quiet. Eleven minutes, usually. Then the plate goes straight into the water and the evening starts, and the evening is long.

She used to lay a place. For about a year after, she did it properly: mat, knife, fork, the good glass, the whole performance. Then one Tuesday she caught sight of it from the doorway, one place set at a table for four, and she never did it again, because it looked less like dignity than she had hoped and more like somebody pretending.

The timer goes. She takes the plate out with a tea towel and stands there while it stops being too hot.

And here is what she has never said to a living soul, not even in the prayers she still says most nights out of a habit that started when she was nine.

She cannot picture God being interested in this.

She can picture Him interested in the big things. The illness two floors down. The war on the news. She can even picture Him interested in her at church on a Sunday with her coat on and her hymn book open. But a woman at a worktop at twenty past six on a Wednesday with a plate of fish and a radio on low, eating standing up in eleven minutes, is not a scene she can imagine Him looking at with any warmth. It is too small. It is too much the same. There is nothing in it.

Maybe you eat at a counter too. Maybe it is a lay-by, a desk, the end of a bench, the arm of a chair with the television going. Maybe you have four meals in your rotation and a time that is not a time you chose. And maybe you have quietly filed the whole thing under too ordinary to be noticed.

Stay by the worktop. There is something you have not been shown about that plate.

The evening the men who had sent him away sat down to eat

Isaac had been asked to leave. That is the plain fact underneath the story, and it had been an awkward few years: wells dug and taken, wells dug again and argued over, a family moving on each time rather than fight about water. There was distance, and everybody involved knew exactly how much.

Then one day the king who had sent him away turned up at his camp with two men, and Isaac said the honest thing straight out: why have you come to me, seeing you hate me and sent me away from you.

They had come to swear an oath. And here is what actually sealed it.

And he made them a feast, and they did eat and drink.Genesis 26:30

Not a document. Not a handshake at a gate with witnesses and a copy for each party. A meal. Somebody killed something and cooked it, somebody carried it out, and four men who had been keeping their distance sat down in one place and ate together until it was gone, and in the morning they swore and parted in peace.

You are inside a covenant that was always meant to be kept at a table, and that is not a metaphor somebody added later to be encouraging. Genesis 26:30 puts the eating and the drinking right where the oath is sealed, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that plain physical fact through three thousand years to a worktop with a plate cooling on it.

Why a meal, and not a document

Think about what eating together actually does that no paper can. It puts two parties in one room at one time for as long as the meal takes. It is slow. It cannot be done at a distance, or by proxy, or in a hurry, and you cannot do it while still holding yourself back, because a person who will not eat with you has told you where you stand and a person who will has told you the same thing the other way.

That is why the meal is the seal. It is the least deniable thing two parties can do, and it is repeatable, so that the covenant does not sit in a drawer but happens again every time somebody says sit down.

You have been given the standing to eat rather than the task of earning a seat, and Scripture never once puts the invitation the other way round. His Spirit is not waiting at your kitchen door for a better week before He comes in, and the promise of company was made by God rather than assembled by you out of effort.

Twenty past six is a table

Now here is the part that costs nothing to say and takes a while to believe. The meal that keeps a covenant was never required to be a special one.

Nothing in this article is a ruling about what happens in anybody's church on a Sunday, and it is not my place to hand out verdicts on somebody else's table. This is about your counter. About a plate of fish and a radio on low, and whether God is in the room for that.

And the sentence in Genesis is not sentimental about the catering either. Somebody made a feast, and the point was not the menu; the point was that people who had been apart were at one table with their hands on the same food.

You are eaten with. That is the whole of it, said as plainly as it can be said, and it does not require another person in the flat to be true. Scripture has God repeatedly sitting down with people rather than summoning them, and the Spirit is the One who makes an ordinary kitchen at dusk into a place where somebody is genuinely present.