His Brother Birthday Meal

It is a good restaurant. His brother booked it eight weeks ago, before any of this, and there are fourteen of them down one long table with the lamps turned low and two high chairs at the far end.

He is on the left hand side, six along, with a menu open in both hands.

He has read the third line of the mains four times now. Chicken, something, with something. He knows it is the fourth time because he has been counting, the way a man counts when counting is the only thing his head will still do properly.

Around him the table is loud in the good way. His sister in law is telling the one about the parking lot barrier and it is landing, and somebody at the other end shouts the punchline before she gets there, and the whole table goes up. A child is being lifted over somebody's lap. Two of them are arguing about whether to get the platter for the middle.

Nobody at this table is doing anything wrong.

That is the thing he keeps coming back to. They are not cold. They are not ignoring him. Three of them have asked how he is and he said good, yeah, busy, and they took it, because why would they not take it, and because his brother is forty today and this is his night.

Somewhere between the drinks and the food he became aware that there is a pane of glass down the length of this table with him on one side of it, and that he is going to have to get through two hours and a cake.

The waiter comes round. Everyone orders fast, they know what they want. The waiter gets to him.

And he hears himself say, still holding the menu open, sorry, could you come back to me.

That is you.

Maybe it was not a birthday. Maybe it was a work lunch, or a Sunday service with the row full, or a school pickup with everybody talking about the holidays. But your life stopped in one afternoon and theirs did not, and now you are moving through rooms full of people who have every right to be happy, holding something none of them know is in your hands.

Two things, before we go one step further.

You are not doing this wrong. Sitting behind that pane of glass is not a failure of faith and it is not ingratitude and it is not you being difficult at your own brother's meal.

And I am not going to explain any of it to you. Not why it happened and not what it is for. I do not know. Whoever told you they did was guessing, and a guess in a kind voice is still a guess.

A promise spoken in front of a crowd, addressed to one man

There is a line in Deuteronomy that gets read at people going through hard things, usually badly, and I want to open it properly because the setting of it is the whole point.

And the LORD, he it is that doth go before thee; he will be with thee, he will not fail thee, neither forsake thee: fear not, neither be dismayed.Deuteronomy 31:8

Here is the scene. Moses is at the end of his life and the entire nation is assembled. Everybody is there. And in front of that whole crowd he turns to one man, Joshua, and speaks this over him.

Now look at the grammar, because in the old English it survives and in modern English it disappears. Thee. Not you plural. Thee. In a field with a nation standing in it, the promise goes to one person, singular, by name.

That is exactly the shape of the room you are sitting in.

You have a promise tonight that was addressed to one man in the middle of a crowd, and it did not get diluted by the number of people at the table. Deuteronomy 31:8 is spoken in a full assembly and lands on a single person, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that landing now, in a restaurant, at the sixth chair on the left, while a joke about a parking lot barrier is going on over your head.

Look at what it actually says He does. He goes before. He is with. He does not fail. He does not forsake. Four things, and not one of them requires anybody in that room to understand what is happening to you.

You are accompanied at this table whether or not one person here knows why the menu is taking you so long. That is what is written over Joshua in front of the whole nation, and the Spirit of God is called the Comforter, which is a word for somebody who comes and sits with a man rather than a word for somebody who explains him to others.

For the man with nobody

Now let me speak to a different reader for a paragraph, because he is on this page too, and he is used to being skipped.

Some of you have no long table. There is no brother with a birthday. There is nobody to be lonely in front of, and articles like this one usually assume there is, and then you close the tab.

Nothing in what I have just told you was resting on that table. You have the same promise sitting alone in an apartment with the television on that Joshua had standing in front of a nation. Deuteronomy 31:8 puts the going before and the not forsaking entirely on God's side of the sentence, with nothing at all on the crowd's side, and it is the Holy Spirit who is present in an empty room exactly as He is present in a full one.

And I am not going to imply that this is your own doing. I have no idea what your last five years have looked like and I am not going to hand you a diagnosis on top of everything else.

You were not left alone in the room where the news came, and you are not alone in whatever room you are in tonight. What is written says He does not forsake, present tense, no conditions attached to it anywhere in the verse, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a felt thing rather than a fact filed away.