The Guest Who Eats Fast

The dish comes around a second time and he does not see it, because his bowl has been empty for four minutes and he has already folded his hands in his lap.

It is a courtyard in the evening, when the lamps have been lit in the wall niches and the fig tree over the table is holding the last of the light. He was invited. That is the thing to hold on to. Somebody's mother put a hand on his arm in the street three days ago and said come on Thursday, we are cooking anyway, and she said it again in the way that means it, and so here he is, on a cushion at the long low table with a family that is not his.

And he ate the way he has eaten since he was seven years old. Fast. Not rudely, he would tell you, and he is right, nobody at the table noticed a thing. But fast. He had the bread in his hand before the water jug had gone round. He cleared what was set in front of him without looking up, and when it was gone he sat back and put his hands in his lap and became a person who was not eating.

Here is why, and he has never said it out loud to anybody. Where he grew up, you ate what was in front of you before it was gone. That was not a hardship, it was arithmetic. There were a lot of them and there was one dish and the dish did not come round twice. Nobody was cruel about it. He simply learned, at seven, the way a person learns which stair creaks, that food is a thing you catch. And a boy who learns that at seven is a man of forty who catches things, still, at a table where nothing is being taken away from anyone.

So the dish is coming round again now, in the hands of the grandmother, and there is more rice in it than there was in his bowl to begin with, and there is a second flatbread wrapped in a cloth that nobody has even opened. There is more. There has been more the entire time. He has been sitting inside an abundance for an hour with his hands in his lap, full of nothing, being polite about it.

And when he goes home he will lie in the dark and feel that particular hollow that comes after an evening with kind people, and he will not have a word for it, and he will decide he is tired.

Now. I am not going to name the thing you have been reaching for lately, and I am not going to ask. If I name it you will hold yours up beside it and start doing arithmetic on whose was bigger, and that arithmetic is exactly what this page is trying to get you out of. But I will say this. I think you eat fast too. And I think you have been doing it with God.

Nobody ever told you there was more

Watch what a person who eats fast does when he prays.

He asks for one thing. The minimum. The specific, defensible, modest thing, briefly, and then he stops, because he has an instinct older than his theology that says do not stand at the dish too long. He says amen the way the guest sits back and puts his hands in his lap. He does not ask whether there is a second flatbread in a cloth that nobody has opened.

And if you asked him why, he would give a good answer about reverence, and he would half believe it. But it is not reverence. It is seven years old. It is the arithmetic he learned before he could read: there is one dish and it does not come round twice, so be quick, and be grateful, and never be the one who asks.

Now listen to God talking to a whole nation of fast eaters.

Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and let your soul delight itself in rich food.Isaiah 55:2

Read what He is not saying. He is not saying eat less. He is not saying you have been greedy at My table. He is speaking to people who have worn themselves out on things that fill nobody, and the correction He hands them is not a smaller appetite, it is a better table. Eat what is good. Let your soul delight itself. That is an invitation to linger, from the Host, in His own voice, at exactly the place where a lesser god would have started clearing the dishes.

You are welcome at a table where nobody is counting what you take, and the hurry you learned at seven was never held against you here. I am not saying that to be kind to you. Isaiah 55:2 has God Himself telling His people to eat what is good and let the soul delight, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line written to a nation of hurried people and sets it down beside one particular bowl on one particular evening.

And there is a detail in that chapter that people walk past. The invitation opens with a shout in a public place, addressed to everyone who is thirsty and to everyone who has nothing, which is a strange pair of people to call to a banquet unless the emptiness is the qualification rather than the obstacle. The Host is not running a door policy. He is running a kitchen.

You have a Host who keeps the dish coming, and He has never once grown tired of your hunger. That is not sentiment, it is what is written: in Isaiah 55 the Lord calls the thirsty to come to the waters and the one with nothing to come and eat, and His Spirit is the One who makes an ancient call sound like it has your name inside it.

What the hurry has been telling you

Here is the part that costs something to look at, so we will look at it gently.

The fast eating is not really about food, and it was never really about the courtyard. It is a sentence you have been carrying, and the sentence is this: what is here is all there is, so take it now. Every hurried thing you have ever done was obedience to that sentence. The way you take a compliment and put it down quickly. The way you leave a good conversation before it can end on its own. The way you asked God for one small thing this morning and then said amen fast, before He could tire of you.

And underneath that sentence is a second one, quieter, and this is the one I want to reach. It is not really I must be quick. It is I am too much for this table. If I stay, if I reach again, if I let them see how hungry I actually am, this stops being hospitality and starts being a burden.

That sentence has been running your life and it did not come from God. Look at the Host in Isaiah 55 again. He is the one raising His voice in the street. He is the one saying come, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters, and the one who has nothing, come. Nobody argues Him into it. He is not being talked round. He is standing in the road with the dish in His hands, calling to people who have not asked yet.

You were not brought in on trial, and this meal is not a test somebody is watching you take. Isaiah 55:2 is God asking a whole people why they are spending themselves on what does not satisfy, and then handing them a table instead of a lecture, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries that difference into a room where a person has spent forty years being careful.

Think about what that costs Him and what it does not cost you. A host who goes into the road has already decided that the meal is going out whether or not anybody deserves it, and he has decided it before he knows who will come. The grandmother with the dish is not weighing the guest. She is walking around the table.

You are the one He called in from the road, and you are not the burden at this table. Scripture says the Lord invites the one who has nothing to come and eat, which means arriving empty was never the problem, and His Spirit is the One who makes an ancient invitation land on somebody who is still braced to be asked to leave.