Let Me Get the Plates

Marty is on the water before there is any color in the sky, because that is when the fish are moving and because it is the one hour of the day nobody needs him for anything. By the time he brings the boat back in, the far edge of the lake has gone the color of a new penny and the mist is coming up off it in long slow ropes.

Dale is on the bank with a fire going.

Not a big fire. A driftwood fire in a ring of stones, with the blackened coffee pot sitting off to one side of it and a cast iron skillet already down on the coals, and whatever is in that skillet has been in there long enough that Marty can smell it from thirty feet out. Dale did not text him. Dale did not ask. Dale has been up since four, apparently, and there are two crates pulled up to the fire and one of them is obviously for Marty.

Marty ties off the boat. Then he starts hauling.

He hauls the cooler up the bank. He goes back down for the rods. He goes back down again for the net and the tackle bag and the wet jacket he does not need, and he is halfway down the bank a fourth time for a thing he has already brought up when Dale says his name.

"Sit down."

"I'll just get the," Marty says.

"Marty."

He sits, but he sits the way a man sits on a bench in a waiting room, right on the front edge of the crate with his weight still in his feet. Dale hands him a plate. Marty holds it in both hands and looks at it. Eggs, and two pieces of bread that have been down in the skillet grease and gone gold at the edges, and a slice of tomato from Dale's garden with salt on it.

"Let me get the plates after," Marty says.

"There's no after," Dale says. "Eat it."

And here is the thing about Marty that he would not be able to tell you, because he has never once put it into words in fifty-one years. He is not being polite. He is not being humble. Something in his chest has come up hard and hot and unhappy, the way it always does, and it is saying this is not square, this is not square, you owe him, and it will not stop saying it until he has carried something, fixed something, or scrubbed something.

He eats the eggs. They are the best thing he has tasted in a month.

And the whole time he is eating them, he is looking past Dale's shoulder at the boat, planning what he can do on the way out so that this does not count.

There is no after

On a shoreline once, at that same hour, seven men came in off a night of catching nothing and found a fire already going on the beach. There were coals. There was fish on the coals. There was bread. Somebody had been down there in the dark getting it ready while they were out on the water failing.

And the risen Christ, standing by that fire, said one thing to them.

Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord.John 21:12

Come and dine. Not come and help. Not come and explain about the night. Not come and settle up about the courtyard and the charcoal fire and the three times. Peter was carrying every one of those, and none of them came up, because the meal was already cooking and the Lord who cooked it wanted him to eat.

You are invited to a breakfast that was already on the coals before you came in off the water, and there is nothing for you to contribute to it. I am not softening that for you. John 21:12 is a written invitation to eat, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence spoken on a beach two thousand years ago and stands it up in a kitchen, at a table, in front of a person who has never once been able to sit down.

He did ask them to bring some of the fish they had caught, and I love that He did, because it means the giving was not shut off. But look at the order. The fire was lit first. The bread was there first. Nothing they brought made the meal happen, and nothing they brought made them welcome at it.

You have a seat at that fire that was not issued to you on the strength of what you hauled up the bank. The written word puts the invitation before the contribution every single time, and the same Spirit who kept the coals hot on that shoreline is the One holding the plate out now.

The reflex is not rudeness

I want to be careful here, because the reflex Marty has is usually treated as a bad habit and it is not one.

A man who cannot be fed without immediately working it off is not proud. Nine times out of ten he is a man who learned, early and thoroughly, that being useful was the reason a room kept him. Nobody sat him down and told him that. He worked it out, the way children work things out, from who got thanked and who got noticed and what happened on the days he had nothing to offer. And what he learned went in so deep that it is not a thought any more. It is a feeling in the chest that comes up before the plate is even warm in his hands.

So he was never really refusing the eggs. He was trying to stay allowed.

Now hear what Scripture actually does with that, because it is not a scolding.

The shepherd's psalm has one line in it that people quote so often they have stopped hearing the grammar. Thou preparest a table before me. Thou. Not I. The whole labor of the meal sits on the other side of that sentence, and the sheep contributes nothing to it but an appetite and a body in the chair. That is not a metaphor to admire from a distance. It is a description of a real meal being really set down in front of a person who did not cook it, and the psalm never once apologizes for the sheep eating it.

You are the guest at this table and you were never the staff, and no amount of clearing has ever changed which one you are. The written word says He prepares it, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that plain verb and works it down past the reflex in your chest to the place where the reflex actually lives.

And no, this does not mean the wanting to help is wrong or has to go. You are welcome to love serving and to be terrible at receiving, and He is not correcting the first thing in order to fix the second. Scripture never treats a servant heart as a problem to be broken, and the Spirit of God is not in the business of making you less generous. He is in the business of getting one meal into you that you did not pay for in work.