You Set The Table Again

He counted the chairs on Sunday because there were not enough, and that was the first he thought about any of it.

Nine people. Two of them had brought somebody, which is how it works in that family, and he had gone through to the front room for the two spare chairs and come back and wedged them in at the end, and it had been perfectly ordinary and slightly chaotic and somebody had spilled something.

He was at the sink afterwards when it arrived.

For about four years there was nobody at that table. Not by any decision. There was no announcement and no falling out and the invitations simply stopped going out, and then people stopped assuming, and then a house that had been full for twenty years was a house where two people ate quietly.

He could not tell you when it started again. There was a Sunday with his sister, and then one with the neighbors, and then it was normal, and now there are not enough chairs, and nobody in that family has ever mentioned any part of it out loud, including the four years.

And the matter he has been asking God about is exactly where it was. He would want that on the record before anything else, because he is a man who has been talked at hopefully by a number of well meaning people.

And a cousin said last month: primo, fast about it again.

He said he would. And what he thought, at the sink, was a question with nothing attached: what else has been happening in this house that nobody has counted?

If you have gone looking for spare chairs recently, come and sit at this table.

Nothing here reinterprets the matter

Let us settle that in the first minute, because otherwise you will read the rest with your guard up and you would be right to.

The matter is where it was. This page does not suggest it has secretly moved and does not imply that a more grateful man would see progress in it. That is asking somebody to argue with their own life and it is not what is happening here.

You are not being talked at, and your account of it has been accurate the whole time. That is not a soft opening. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit is the one who was in that house through all four of the quiet years, and He never once required a man to pretend they were something else.

There is another place to look. Sunday happened there, and so did the chairs.

The psalm reports afterwards

There is a psalm about a change that had already happened, and it is written by people who were plainly still working out what to make of it.

Then was our mouth filled with laughter, and our tongue with singing.Psalm 126:2

Read the first word. Then.

The whole psalm is a group of people looking back at something and reporting it after the fact. They say it was like a dream, which is the phrase people use when a thing has happened and they were not present for the mechanics of it.

Nobody in that psalm describes the day it turned. They describe a mouth that is full of something it was not full of before, and they notice it afterwards, and that is the whole testimony.

You are noticing after the fact, and that is how this has always been reported. I am not saying it to make a Sunday sound like a miracle: it is what the psalm does and the word it begins with (Psalm 126:2), and it is His Spirit, not this page, who fills a house without any of it appearing in a diary.

And the chairs are not a sign

Here is the plain thing, because it is exactly where a page like this normally spoils what it has just handed over.

The chairs are not a signal. They do not mean the matter is about to turn, they are not the first stage of anything, and they tell you nothing whatsoever about the year in front of you.

You are holding no forecast, and nobody here knows what happens next. Scripture says it is not for you to know the times or the seasons, which the Father hath put in his own power (Acts 1:7), and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than a disappointment, because a true small thing turns into a bet the moment somebody makes it evidence.

And what you went without over those years bought nothing, in either direction. It did not fail, and it did not quietly succeed in the house instead. There was no transaction in it.

Now the sentence this site says everywhere. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. Diabetes, pregnancy, medication, any hard relationship with eating, being underweight, unwell, elderly or simply unsure: speak to your doctor and let their answer be the answer. You are not one step further from God because of what your body needs. 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 ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.