The Woman at the Hatch

Forty plates go out through the hatch every Wednesday and not one of them has ever come back to her.

She has cooked the lunch club for twenty-six years. Roast on the first Wednesday, pie on the second, fish on the third, and whatever the freezer says on the fourth. Forty pensioners at two long tables in the church hall, the noise of forty people who have waited all week for this, cutlery going, somebody's hearing aid whistling, the same man telling the same story about the flood of seventy-nine. She knows who cannot have gravy and who wants their pudding first and who will slip a roast potato into a napkin for the dog. She plates every one of them herself, at the hatch, and slides them through, and the helpers carry them out.

And when the last plate has gone and the tea trolley is round and the noise has settled into the contented hum of a room that has been fed, she eats. Standing at the hatch, in her apron, out of the roasting tin, with the serving spoon. Whatever is left. The end of the joint that would not slice, three potatoes that caught, the last of the carrots gone soft. She eats it fast, half watching the room, because somebody will want more custard in a minute. She has done this every Wednesday for twenty-six years and she would tell you she likes it that way. Nobody has ever laid her a place. It has never once occurred to anybody, including her, that the woman at the hatch is also hungry.

Here is the thing she does not say. It is not only Wednesdays. It is her whole life. She has fed herself out of whatever was left over for as long as she can remember: the crusts, the ends, the ten minutes when nobody needed her, a verse on a calendar in the kitchen, a sermon half heard through the hatch while she washed up. Foraging. Feeding herself out of what she could find, and calling it enough, and never sitting down.

You know the hatch. Yours might not be in a church hall. But you know what it is to have been the one who finds the food, for yourself and everybody else, out of what was left, for so long that the feeling of being handed a plate is gone. And you know the small, tired question underneath twenty-six years of it: does anyone ever set a table for me?

He prepares it. That is the whole verb.

I want to read you a psalm the way I read a ledger: line by line, and only what is actually written. Because the twenty-third psalm gets read at funerals and printed on tea towels, and I do not think it has ever once fed you, and it is a meal.

The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He makes me lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside still waters. He restores my soul. He leads me in paths of righteousness for his name's sake. Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and your staff, they comfort me. You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows. Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.Psalm 23

Now count who does what. He makes me lie down. He leads me. He restores. He leads. Thou art with me. You prepare a table. You anoint my head. My cup overflows. Every verb of feeding, laying, pouring and restoring belongs to the Shepherd. Do you know what the sheep does in this psalm? It lies down. It is led. It walks through a valley. It sits at a table. There is no verse where the sheep cooks. There is no verse where the sheep goes and finds the pasture. The sheep in Psalm 23 has never once fed itself out of a roasting tin, and David, who kept sheep and knew exactly how helpless they are, wrote it that way on purpose, and the same Spirit who breathed it through him is the one reading it to you now.

You have a Shepherd who prepares the table, and the preparing is His and not yours, and it was His before you tied the apron on. I am not reading that into the psalm; it is the plain grammar of Psalm 23:5, and it is the Holy Spirit who lifts a verse off a tea towel and lays it in front of a hungry person as a plate. He is not waiting for you to finish serving. He is the one serving.

Name the hunger before the meal

Here is the weight, and I am going to name it plainly, because it has sat under the apron so long it stopped feeling like weight.

The word for it is hungry. Not greedy; hungry. There is a difference, and every person who has ever told you to be grateful was answering the wrong question. Gratitude is not the price of a meal. A hungry person is not fixed by better manners. Twenty-six years of eating out of the tin, and the trouble with foraging is not that it is wrong. It is that a person who forages never actually eats. They graze. They take what is left, standing up, watching the room, and the reaching starts again by evening because nothing that is grabbed at the hatch was ever meant to fill you. That is not a fault in you. That is what leftovers are.

And underneath the hunger is a belief so old you would be embarrassed to say it aloud: that serving is your job and being served is for other people. That if you sat down, the room would go unfed. That a table with your name on it is a nice idea for the pensioners and not a thing that exists.

You are seated at a table He set, and you were seated before you finished reading this sentence. Look at the psalm again: You prepare a table before me. Before me. Not after the room is done. Not once the custard has gone round. It is written that the table is set in front of the sheep while the enemies are still standing there, which means it is set in the middle of the noise and not after it, and the Spirit who breathed that line is the one who pulls the chair out for you. Nothing about the forty plates disqualifies you from the forty-first.

The table is a table

Now I am going to be a steward about this and refuse to let the table turn into a metaphor too fast, because that is how it got taken off you. Somebody has always been quick to say of course it means a spiritual table, and you nodded, and went back to the hatch. Slow down. David wrote table. He wrote oil and cup and overflows. He was a shepherd who had been fed at real tables and he chose the most physical picture available to him. Jesus, who called Himself the good shepherd, cooked breakfast on a beach for men who had been out all night and caught nothing on their own, and He said come and have breakfast, and He took the bread and gave it to them (John 21:12-13). He did not hand Peter the pan.

So the meal is a meal. It is not a feeling about being provided for. It is being handed a plate by somebody who made it for you.

You have a place laid, with a chair, at a table where He does the serving, and the sitting down is the only thing on your side of the ledger. Scripture wrote the sheep as the one who lies down and is led and is fed, and the Holy Spirit is not asking you to earn the chair by finishing the washing up first. He is asking you to sit in it.