Tray Three, Hospital Canteen, Half Past Six

You could draw that canteen from memory now. The route from the lift, the corner where the trolley goes, the table by the window that looks out at the multi-story.

Five weeks tomorrow.

You go down at about twenty past six, because that is when they do his obs and it is easier for everyone if you are not standing in the way. You take the same route. You take a tray. You take whatever the hot thing is, because deciding is beyond you and has been since about the second week, and something in a bowl, and a cup of tea you do not finish.

You sit at the table by the window and you eat it and you go back up.

If somebody asked you what you had eaten in the last five weeks you could not tell them. Not one meal. You know there has been a fish pie in there somewhere because you remember thinking something about the potato.

It is not that you are too upset to eat. You are eating. You are eating every night, sensibly, which is more than a lot of people manage in this building.

It is that the eating has become a thing that happens to you in the twenty-five minutes between one part of the day and the next part of the day, and no part of you is present for any of it.

And tonight there was a family at the next table saying something over their food before they started, the mother doing it quietly, the children with their eyes half open. And you sat there with your fork already in your hand and had not thought of it once in five weeks.

He wrote that line while he was in trouble

Sit here a minute. The obs will take twenty minutes and there is nowhere you have to be.

Let me put the true thing down first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit is not going to nudge a woman in her fifth week: you are not doing this badly. Eating every night in a hospital canteen at half past six while somebody you love is on the fourth floor is not a failure of anything; it is what keeping going looks like from the inside. Nobody is on trial at this table.

Now come and look at a line that gets printed on things and was written somewhere much worse than a canteen.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.Psalm 34:8

Everybody knows that sentence. Almost nobody knows where David was when he wrote it. The heading on that psalm places it at the point where he had run from Saul into enemy territory, was recognized, and got out alive by pretending to be out of his mind, scratching at a gate with spit running down his beard.

That is the day. That is the day the line about tasting was written.

So it is not a line about a good week. It is not about savoring things when life is pleasant. It is an instruction issued by a man who had just eaten fear for a fortnight, and what he tells you to do is taste. Actually taste. Register something. Be present for one thing and notice that it is good.

You are permitted to be present for twenty-five minutes in that canteen, and the man who wrote the invitation was in far worse trouble than you are when he wrote it. That is not me making something out of a tray. That is what is written, and where that psalm comes from, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a table by a window at half past six.

Here is what nobody explains about saying something over food. When you speak over that tray, you are not doing something extra with energy you do not have. 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. It takes six seconds and costs nothing you are short of.

A blessing over a hospital tray is not a smaller blessing, and this is not a lesser table because of the building it is in. Scripture says every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), and there is no clause in it about circumstances, and the Spirit is the one who makes that live in a room rather than merely be correct in a book.

What the twenty-five minutes has become

Now let me name it gently, because I do not think you have had the room to notice it. What is written will do the noticing, and the Spirit is not adding anything to your day.

The eating has become a gap. Not a break, not a rest: a gap between the ward and the ward, and you cross it the way a person crosses a corridor, and the entire function of it is to get you to the other side upright.

That is not neglect of yourself. It is a woman in her fifth week doing exactly what is required and nothing that is not required, because there is not enough of her to do anything that is not required.

And what is written never once required a person to have spare capacity before a word could be said. The Spirit is not asking you to find energy. He is asking for six seconds, which you already have, sitting still, with a fork in your hand.

God is in that canteen at half past six, and He is not upstairs waiting for you to come back. It is written that the LORD is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit (Psalm 34:18), which is eleven verses after the one about tasting and in the same psalm from the same terrible fortnight, and the same Spirit who breathed both lines is at this table, which is why they land as a description of where He is rather than as encouragement to feel better.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to eat better, to take proper breaks, to look after yourself, or any of the things people have been saying to you for five weeks with the best will in the world. Nothing here adds to your day. If tomorrow you eat it in nine minutes without noticing, nothing is lost.

What you say over a tray in a canteen 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 woman saying seven words over a hot thing she did not choose is doing exactly what the family at the next table were doing.