The House Was Full and I Was Not

Nineteen people were in his house on Sunday, and he counted, because he always counts.

Two of his sisters and their husbands. Six children under eleven, which sounds worse than it is. His mother, who arrives at eleven and starts moving furniture. A neighbor who has been coming for four years and is not a neighbor any more in any sense that matters. Three others who came with somebody.

He cooked for all of them and he is good at it and he would do it again next Sunday, which he will.

By half past four they were gone. Not abruptly. It thinned out the way it always thins out, one car and then two, and somebody standing in the doorway finishing a story, and then his mother last with a bag of things for him to keep.

And by five he was standing in the dining room with a cloth in his hand and the chairs still out of place, and the house was so quiet he could hear the refrigerator.

He would not call it lonely. He would push back on that hard, because he is not a lonely man and it would be an insult to a family that shows up for him every week of the year. Loneliness is not it.

What it is, is that the fullness was in the room and not in him. And when the room emptied it went out with the cars.

Monday is worse than Sunday evening. Monday afternoon is the exact bottom of it, and he has known that for two years and has never told a single one of the nineteen.

The sentence he has never said, not to his wife and not to his mother, is a strange one to explain: I am at my emptiest an hour after the fullest thing in my life.

You may know that hour. The good thing ended and something in you went out with it.

A full table is not a full man

Start by defending the Sundays, because he will not hear a word against them and he should not have to.

Those nineteen people are a real gift. A man with a full table has something most people would trade a great deal for, and nothing about this is a warning against loving your family too much. God is not standing in that dining room at five o'clock hinting that he should have had fewer people over.

The distinction is between two things that feel identical while they are happening. A full room and a filled man.

A full room is atmosphere. It is warmth generated by proximity, and it is genuinely warming, and it lasts exactly as long as the proximity does. That is not a defect in the room. It is the nature of atmosphere. When the last car goes, the atmosphere goes, because atmosphere was never inside him. It was between them.

You are not failing at gratitude, and Psalm 23:5 has God preparing a table for one man and then doing something separate and additional to that man himself, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who takes a shepherd's psalm and lands it on a Monday afternoon with the chairs still out.

Read the verse and watch how many things are happening.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

Three actions. A table set. A head anointed. A cup overflowing. And they are not the same action.

The oil is not the table

Look at the second one, because it is the one he keeps skipping.

The table is provision spread out in front of him. The oil is put on him. One is set before a man and the other one touches him, and the psalm names them separately on purpose, in the same breath, as two distinct kindnesses from the same God.

He has an outstanding table. Nineteen chairs of it. And he has been assuming that a well set table constitutes an anointed head, which it does not, and never did, and was never claimed to.

You have a table and you were also always meant to be anointed, because the written word puts both in one verse and refuses to collapse them into each other, and the Spirit of God is what makes that stop being a distinction he grants and start being a thing he asks for.

Then the third one. My cup runneth over. Not full. Over. Which is worth noticing because a man who feeds nineteen people knows exactly what overflow is for. Overflow is what makes a host possible. Nobody pours out of an empty cup for four years running without something being wrong somewhere.

You are meant to be poured into and not only poured from, and Psalm 23 gives the running over to the guest and not to the host, and the same Spirit who carried that psalm through three thousand years carries it into a dining room at five.

Monday is not an accusation

Now the thing he half suspects, which is that feeling this way about Monday means something is ungrateful in him.

There is nothing ungrateful in him. Monday afternoon is not a verdict on how much he loves his family; it is a measurement of where the supply was coming from. The bottom of Monday is honest information and it is not a charge.

And notice the setting of that psalm. There is no gathering in it. A man, a shepherd, a table, an enemy somewhere in the vicinity, and God doing three things to one person. Nobody else is present for the anointing.

You have everything this needs in an empty room, because Psalm 23:5 has God attending to one man on his own with nobody there to make it happen, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an empty dining room a perfectly good place to receive.