The Table Got Smaller

For nine nights that house held thirty people and the front door was never once locked.

His mother died in February. Eighty one. She had lived with them for the last six years, in the room off the kitchen, and she made the rice on Sundays until about eighteen months before the end when her hands would not do it any more, and then she sat and told his wife exactly how it was going wrong.

Everybody came. His sister flew in from Chicago and stayed twelve days. Two cousins drove eleven hours. The house was so full that people slept on the floor of the front room and somebody's baby was passed around like a dish for a week.

And every night, for nine nights, thirty people prayed in that living room, and afterward there was food, and it went on until midnight, and there were four conversations happening at once in two languages.

Then everybody went back. Chicago, Houston, the two cousins to their own state. All of it correct. All of it what has to happen.

The first Sunday after, there were eleven at the table.

The second Sunday, nine.

Now it is the summer and on a good Sunday there are six, and six is a fine number, and six is his wife and his two kids and his brother-in-law and one of the kids' friends who is always there, and it is a good table and he is glad of it.

And nobody at that table knows that when he sets it, he still counts to eight.

He does it without deciding to. Plates out of the cupboard, and his hands go to eight, and then he stands there for a second and puts one back, and then he calls everybody in.

That second is the loneliest second of his week and there is nobody in the world he can describe it to.

If that is a cupboard anybody has stood in front of, stay with me. There is a line in the psalms about exactly this and it is shorter than you would expect.

God sets the solitary in families

Here it is, five words in the middle of a psalm about God going out before His people.

God setteth the solitary in families.Psalm 68:6

Now notice something about the grammar, because it is doing more than it looks like.

It does not say families take care of the solitary. It says God sets. He is the one doing the placing. The family is where He puts a person, not the thing that does the work instead of Him.

That matters at a cupboard door on a Sunday, because it means the six people about to sit down at that table are not a reduced version of the thirty. They are a placement. And the one who did the placing is not one of the six, and He is not on a plane back to Chicago, and He does not have a return flight at all.

You are set in that room by God Himself, and you were set there on the Sunday there were eleven and on the Sunday there were nine. Psalm 68:6 is the written word making Him the one who places rather than the one who watches, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that dining room every week since February.

And there is the other word in the verse, which is solitary, and it is worth sitting with. Scripture uses that word about a man with people around him, in a family, at a table. It knows perfectly well that a person can be solitary in a full room, and it does not treat that as ingratitude.

You have not been ungrateful for the six, and you were never wrong to feel solitary at a table you love. Psalm 68:6 uses that exact word about somebody God is putting into a family, and the Spirit of God is not offended by a man who counts to eight.

The nine nights were not a promise

Now let me protect your sister and your cousins, because you are going to see them at Christmas and I will not have anything sitting between you.

Twelve days. Eleven hours in a car. Floors slept on. That is not a small thing and most people on this earth do not get it.

But a family cannot live at that intensity, and it was never offered as a permanent arrangement. The nine nights were a gift given at full strength and then finished, the way a gift is. Nobody promised the house would stay full.

And here is the thing nobody in Chicago knows: they think the house is still full. They remember thirty people. In their heads that is what it is like there, and every one of them pictures a full house, because that is the house they were in.

That is not neglect. That is what distance does to a picture.

Keep them. Every one of them. And keep the nine nights as what they were, which was your family carrying you through the part that could not be carried alone.

Right now, as you read this, you are held by one who did not fly anywhere, and you were never handed off to a schedule. Psalm 68:6 makes God the one doing the setting, and His Spirit has been at that table on every Sunday since the last car pulled out.

What the counting to eight actually is

Here is the part I want you to hear as a man who has stood in a lot of kitchens on a lot of Sundays.

The hand going to eight is not a malfunction. It is love with nowhere to put itself down.

Six years of eight plates is in that hand. Six years of a woman in the room off the kitchen telling your wife exactly how the rice was going wrong. The hand learned something true and the hand is still telling the truth about it.

So do not correct it. Do not train yourself out of it. There will come a Sunday when your hand goes to six on its own and you will not be able to decide whether that is mercy or theft, and no one can tell you in advance which it will feel like.

And in the meantime, that second at the cupboard is not a failure. It is the only moment in the whole week when she is fully in the room.

You are keeping something in that second rather than being defeated by it, and you were never being punished by your own hands. Psalm 68:6 puts God in the middle of a household rather than outside it, and the Holy Spirit is at work at a cupboard door as much as at a nine night prayer.