Picking at the Edges

He is out in the hay field before the light is all the way up. Third week of August, second cutting, and the dew is still holding in the windrows, so he has to wait on the baler whether he likes it or not.

Breakfast is whatever he can reach with one hand. Two soda crackers out of the glovebox, sleeve and all. A thermos of coffee that had already gone lukewarm before it ever went in the thermos. He eats standing at the tailgate with the truck door open and the radio low, watching the fog come off the bottom end of the field where the ground stays wet.

He is fifty one years old and he is not poor and he is not hungry in the way the word usually gets used. Ninety yards behind him there is a house with a pantry his aunt keeps stocked out of pure habit. Jars of beans and peaches with the year marked on the lid in grease pencil. A chest freezer he has not reached the bottom of in two years. Half a ham. There is a kitchen table in that house with four chairs pushed in around it and a wooden bowl of onions in the middle of it, and since he moved in he has sat down at it maybe eleven times.

He does not sit down. That is the whole thing.

It is not a discipline and it is not a hardship. If you asked him he would tell you he is efficient, and he would be telling the truth as far as it goes. But the reason underneath it is older than efficiency, and he has never once said it out loud, because it has never occurred to him as a lack.

In the house he grew up in, supper was a pan left on the stove and you got yours when you got it. There was food most of the time. Nobody ever called anybody. There was never a moment when a person stood in a doorway and said his name and meant come and sit down, we waited. So he learned what a great many people learn, which is that food is something you get, standing, in between the things that actually matter.

Last night at nine o'clock he stood in the pantry doorway with the light still off, eating cold green beans out of a jar with a dinner fork, in a house that had every single ingredient of a real supper on the shelf behind his shoulder.

Picking at the edges. In a stocked house.

And out at the tailgate this morning, with the fog going off the low end and the crackers gone and nothing to do but wait on the dew, he had a thought he did not care for at all.

He thought: if somebody set a table for me, I am not sure I would know what to do at it.

The question that got answered

There is a place in the Psalms where a whole nation asks that exact question out loud, in the desert, with nothing on the horizon, and the psalm writes the question down word for word instead of tidying it up.

Yea, they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?Psalm 78:19

Sit with how that got recorded. It is not phrased kindly. The psalm says plainly they spoke against Him. And it kept the sentence anyway, in the songbook, where everyone could read it forever, because the question was honest and God is not fragile.

Now read a little further in the same psalm and see what came down. Manna, described as the corn of heaven. Meat sent to the full. The question was answered. Not the attitude, not the tone, not the manners. The question.

You are asking a question God has already answered in writing, and the asking of it has never once disqualified you from the table. I am not softening that for you. Psalm 78:19 is the question preserved in the text, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old complaint from a desert and puts it in the mouth of a man at a tailgate at six in the morning so it can finally get answered where he can hear it.

Here is what is worth noticing about a man in a stocked house. The food was never the problem. He had beans and peaches and half a ham. What he did not have was anybody who prepared a meal and then called him to it. And a person who has never been called does not stand around waiting to be called. He forages. He gets efficient. He becomes, over about forty years, extremely good at eating alone with one hand.

You have never once been the reason nobody set a table. His word does not put the failure on the hungry, and the Holy Spirit is not raising that as a question tonight, because it was never a real one.

Preparest is somebody else's verb

The most quoted sentence in the whole Bible about a table hangs on a verb that does not belong to the person eating.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

There is no improving on that and this message is not going to try. What it will do is refuse to hurry past it, because the great temptation with the twenty third Psalm is to turn it into a feeling in about four seconds and never let anybody get a meal out of it.

So take it as it stands. A table, prepared. Prepared by Him, before, and in front of the very things that are still in the field. Oil on the head, which is what you do for a guest you are glad to see. A cup filled past the line and running over the rim onto the cloth, which is a thing nobody does by accident and nobody does for somebody they are tolerating.

You are a guest somebody was glad to see coming, and the oil and the cup are the proof of it rather than the poetry of it. Psalm 23:5 is written and it has not been withdrawn, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old shepherd's line and turns it into a chair being pulled out in a kitchen ninety yards from a hay field.

Preparest is past work. That is the part that undoes a forager. The preparing was finished before he came in from the field, before he was fifty one, before he was eight years old and getting his own out of a pan. The setting of it never once depended on his noticing.

You were fed by a table you did not set, in a house you did not stock, long before you knew what to call it. Psalm 78 says He sent them meat to the full in a place with nothing in it, and the same Spirit who carried bread into a wilderness has been carrying goodness into an ordinary week you have been filing under nothing much happened.