Turning From The Table Toward The Host

In his mother's house, nobody has ever said I love you out loud, and nobody has ever gone hungry either.

That is not a criticism. It is a description. In that house love arrives as a plate. It arrives as a woman standing over you saying eat, eat, in a tone that is not really a request. It arrives as too much bread and somebody's cousin appearing at nine in the evening and a place being made at a table that was already full.

So when a man from his church told him, with real warmth, that fasting is the doorway and that he ought to try going without, something in him closed like a hand.

He could not have explained it at the time. He said the polite thing and changed the subject. But it turned over in him for weeks, and what he eventually found underneath it was this: it sounded to him as though somebody had just told him his mother's table was a lesser sort of holiness.

He has prayed about this and about everything else. In the car. On the stairs at work. Late at night in the language his grandmother prayed in, which he speaks badly and prays well.

And he wants to understand it. That is the thing. He is not resisting out of stubbornness. He would like to know what this whole subject actually is, from somebody who is not going to make him choose between God and a full table.

If you come from a house where love is a plate, come and sit under the vine here a while.

Nothing here is against your mother's table

Let us settle that before anything else, because a whole subject can be poisoned by a single wrong sentence in the first minute.

Food is not the enemy. It never has been. God invented eating, and He is the one who set a feast at the end of the story and not a fast, and the picture He chose for the age to come is a table with people at it and enough for everybody. Your mother is closer to the shape of heaven than the man who told you to give things up, and neither of them was wrong about anything except emphasis.

You are not being asked to disown a single thing about that house. That is not a courtesy said to a guest under a vine. It is written that every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), and it is the Holy Spirit, not this page, who keeps that from being a technicality and makes it what it is, which is a blessing on your mother's kitchen.

What Jesus actually said in the wilderness

There is a sentence people quote at each other about this, and it is worth reading slowly, because it does not say what it is usually made to say.

It is written, Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God.Matthew 4:4

Read the word alone, because everything hangs on it.

He does not say man shall not live by bread. He says not by bread alone. It is not a sentence against the loaf. It is a sentence about what else a person is made to run on, said by a man who ate at more tables than most and was accused of enjoying them.

And notice where He says it. Not at a banquet. In a place with nothing in it, at the end of a long stretch, when His own body was telling Him one thing very loudly and He named something truer without calling the loud thing a liar.

You are made to run on more than one thing, and the second one has been available to you all along. I am not saying that to settle an argument between two men from your church: it is what Jesus quoted in the wilderness at the hardest possible moment (Matthew 4:4), and it is His Spirit, not my paragraph, who takes it from a famous line into something you can use on a Tuesday.

Which is what turning toward the Host means

Here is the plain answer, and it is not a rejection of anything.

Fasting is not the refusal of a good thing because the good thing is bad. It is a person at a full table turning, for a moment, toward the one who set it. Not away from the food in disgust. Toward the Host in attention.

Your family already understands this better than most people who write about it. In that house nobody insults the food to honor the cook. You honor the cook by looking at her, by saying her name, by sitting longer than you needed to.

You already know how to do this, and you learned it in your mother's kitchen. Scripture puts the whole thing this way, that whether ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a way to sit at a table rather than a rule about what goes on it.

There is no plan on this page. No length, no kind, no schedule, nothing to build toward and nothing to complete. This subject collapses into a program the moment anybody gives it numbers, and a program is precisely what would put your mother's table on trial.

Now something said out in the open here and not in small print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply unsure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once come in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and telephone somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.

The hungers that have nothing to do with a plate

And here is the part that hands this to everybody at the table, including the ones who will never miss a meal.

There is the reach for the phone in the first quiet second. There is the wanting to be told you did well. There is the pull toward the reply that would end the argument, the second look, the noise you put on so the house is not silent, the small satisfaction when somebody who was rude to you has a bad week.

Every one of those is an appetite with a direction on it. And every one of them can be turned toward the Host in the middle of an ordinary afternoon, at a full table, with a plate in front of you.

You have a dozen ways to do this today that require nothing of your body at all. The word says draw nigh to God, and he will draw nigh to you (James 4:8), and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a crowded courtyard the actual place it happens.