I Eat Standing Up at the Counter

You are seventy-three and you have not sat down to a meal in your own house in two years and three months.

It is not a decision. Nobody decides a thing like that. It happened the way most of it happened: on about the fourth night you found yourself eating a piece of toast at the counter because putting a plate on the table and pulling out a chair and sitting down in it, at half past six, opposite the other chair, was a thing you could not do that evening.

And then you did it again the next night. And now it is what you do.

You still cook. That is the part your daughter would be surprised by. You do a proper piece of fish twice a week and there is always something green, because forty-nine years of a woman telling you about vegetables does not wear off in two.

But you eat it at the counter, with the radio on, in about six minutes, looking out at the yard.

The table is still there. It has the cloth on it, the one with the pattern she liked. There is a bowl of fruit on it that you replace, which you have never examined too closely.

You do not sit at it. And nothing is said over anything, ever, in this house any more, and you did not notice that had happened until a grandson asked you last month whether you still say grace and you heard yourself say, more or less, that you had got out of the habit.

They broke bread from house to house

Come and stand here with me a minute, and then I am going to ask you to do something quite small.

First, let me say a true thing and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit will not let me be brisk about it. Two years and three months of standing up is not a failure and it is not a symptom to be corrected. It is what a man does when a room is arranged around somebody who is not in it. The chair is not a piece of furniture; you and I both know that. Nobody is on trial in this kitchen.

Now come and look at how the first Christians ate, because it is not what people picture.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart.Acts 2:46

There is a temple in that sentence and there is a house in that sentence, and the eating happens in the house. Not at a festival. Not at an altar. From house to house, daily, ordinary meat on an ordinary evening, and the word attached to it is gladness.

And here is the phrase I want in your hands: singleness of heart. It is not a headcount. It is a description of how a heart is when it eats: undivided, not performing, not maintaining anything. One heart, turned one way, over ordinary food.

Your kitchen is one of the houses in that verse, and you have been in it the whole time, and God has never once counted chairs to decide whether a table is a table. That is not me being gentle with a widower at a counter. That is what is written about where the breaking of bread actually happened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a kitchen at half past six.

Here is what nobody explains about saying something over food. When you speak over your supper, you are not performing a ritual and you are not conjuring anything into a plate. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about His own provision. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. Which means it does not need to be long, and it does not need to be the way she did it, and it does not need anybody else in the room to hear it.

You are permitted to sit down at that table alone and have it be a table. Scripture says every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), which is God putting the weight on the receiving rather than on the company, and the Spirit is the one who makes that live in a room rather than merely true on a page.

What the counter is actually about

Now let me name the thing carefully, because I do not think it is grief in the way people mean it.

Standing up is quick. That is the whole engineering of it. Six minutes, radio on, looking at the yard, and no interval in which anything can be noticed. A chair pulled out at a laid table creates a pause, and the pause is where the other chair is.

You are not avoiding a table. You are avoiding an interval.

That is not weakness and I will not call it that. It is a sensible man managing something enormous with the tools available, and what is written never once required a man to be finished grieving before he could bless his own bread. The Spirit is not standing in this kitchen waiting for you to be better.

God is at that table whether you sit down at it or not, and He has been there for two years and three months. It is written that He prepares a table before us (Psalm 23:5), and the preparing is His and it is done in the present tense, and the same Spirit who breathed that psalm is in this house tonight, which is why it lands as a fact about the room and not as a poem about comfort.

And hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you the counter was wrong, and I am not telling you to sit at that table every night from now on, or to move the fruit bowl, or to do anything at all with the cloth. Nothing here is a program and nothing here is graded. If tomorrow you stand up again, that is not a relapse, because there is nothing to relapse from.

What you say over your own supper is a real thing, and it is complete with nobody there but you and God. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man saying six words over a piece of fish in an empty kitchen is not doing something smaller than a family saying grace at a full table.