The Sandwich In The Car

The lay-by is the second one after the roundabout, because the first one has the bins and the smell.

You have twenty minutes. Twenty two if the traffic behaves at the other end. The sandwich came out of a chilled cabinet under a light that makes everything look slightly blue, and the plastic has that little arrow on the corner that never works, so you open it with your teeth.

The steering wheel is your table. The wheel is not a good table. Things roll off it. There is a crumb in the seam of the passenger seat that has been there since March and you both know it.

You eat facing forward, which is the strangest part and the part nobody mentions. Every meal a human being ever ate, for the whole of history, was eaten facing somebody. You eat facing a windscreen, a hedge, and the back of a lorry that has been parked there since before you arrived.

You are not complaining. It is fine. It is twenty minutes and it does the job and you will get a proper one later, except that later has meant this for about four years now. What has gone is not the food. What has gone is the sitting down. It is not a meal any more, it is refuelling, and refuelling is something you do to a machine before you send it out again.

So put the wheel down for a moment and come and look at a mountain.

There are seventy odd men going up it, slowly, older men, the heads of families. Something enormous has just happened at the bottom: an oath, words read out, a promise made between God and a whole people. And now the elders climb, and near the top the ground under them looks like it has been paved with blue stone, clear as the sky itself, and they see God.

And here is the sentence that should stop you, because it stopped me. They saw God, and they ate and drank.

That is the ending. Not they fell down and were incinerated. Not they were sent away to prepare themselves properly. They sat on a mountain in the presence of God with food in their hands, and they ate.

That was how a covenant was closed in that world. Not with a handshake and not with a document. With a meal. The two parties sat down and ate together in front of witnesses, and the eating was the legal act: from now on my table is your table, and anyone who wants to come at you has to come past my bread first. Everybody watching knew what a shared meal meant, which is why it was such an enormous thing when someone ate with the wrong person.

And they did it there, on the mountain, in the middle of the journey. Not after the wilderness. Not once they got somewhere. The land was forty years off and most of them never saw it. They ate in the middle of everything, with the whole trip still ahead of them, and the meal was not a reward for arriving.

You have been waiting for the proper one later. There is no later. There is a lay-by, a windscreen, twenty minutes, and Somebody who does not consider that beneath Him.

The meal was the signature

Hold on to the mountain, because it explains something people hear a thousand times without ever seeing it.

When people say God wants relationship with you, it sounds like a slogan, and slogans slide off a person on their second shift. The covenant meal is what that slogan is made of. Eating together was the most binding, most public, most ordinary thing two parties could do, and God chose it. He could have chosen anything. He chose the thing that happens with hands and crumbs and someone passing something.

You are inside a covenant that was closed over food, and you were always meant to be at the table rather than at the counter. That is not a nice framing of your lunch break: Exodus 24:11 says that God did not lay a hand on the leaders of Israel, and they ate and drank in His presence, and the Holy Spirit is the One carrying that mountain into a car park.

The table is set in the middle of it

Now the second picture, and it is one that gets read out at funerals while nobody quite hears what it says.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.Psalm 23:5

Read where the table is. Not afterwards. Not once the trouble has been dealt with and everything is quiet and the diary is clear. In the presence of the trouble. The table is laid in the middle of the thing, on the same ground, while it is all still going on, and the man at the table is not pretending the trouble is absent. He is eating in front of it.

That is your lay-by, exactly. You have twenty minutes and a shift on either side of them and a wheel for a table, and Psalm 23:5 does not ask for better conditions before the table goes down. The Spirit of God is the One who sets it, and He sets it where you actually are rather than where you keep promising to be.

And take this next part personally, because it is where the ache usually sits. Eating on your own is not the same thing as eating alone. You are not a leftover from a household that eats properly. There is no version of this where the meal is for families and you get the version in the car. The One who came looking for people to eat with kept choosing the person nobody would sit with, and that was never charity; it was covenant behavior, done in public, so that everybody could see who He had bound Himself to.

Nothing here is a ritual and nothing here is a rule. This is not about a service, or a table in a building, or who may take what from whom, and I am not going anywhere near any of that. This is about a wheel, a wrapper, and twenty minutes, and Someone who sits down in cars.