The Table Is Still Set on Friday

The tablecloth comes out of the second drawer down, the way it has come out of the second drawer down for nineteen years. There is a scorch mark near one corner from a candle that went over the Christmas his youngest was two. He lays it, smooths it with the flat of his hand from the middle outward, and then stands there looking at it, because it is the only thing in this house all month that has gone where it was supposed to go.

Behind him the hall is stacked with box files from an office he no longer has a desk in. The sofa is against the wrong wall because a man in a gray suit said the room shows better that way. There is a For Sale sign leaning in the porch with its face turned in, because he has not been able to make himself carry it out to the grass.

He gets the plates down. Five. He puts the salt cellar where the salt cellar goes, at the corner nearest the window, because his father put it there and because nobody in this family has ever discussed it. He cuts the bread. He lights the two candles at ten past six, and the room changes color the way it changes color every Friday.

Then he stands with his hands on the back of a chair and does not sit down.

Because everything else has moved. The pension moved. The job moved. The five years he had drawn out in his head on the back of an envelope, with the extension and the second car and the money set aside, all of that moved in one phone call on the ninth. The friends who were going to be there have mostly gone quiet, not out of malice, just out of not knowing what to say to a man whose situation is awkward.

And the table is still set on Friday.

That is you, holding a stack of plates in a house you are not going to keep. Or standing in a kitchen that is exactly as it was, in a life that is not. Or doing the one small ordinary thing you have always done at half past six, and finding that your hands are shaking on it.

Before we go any further, three things.

This is not a failure of faith. What came down was not a verdict on how you built.

I am not going to explain it to you. I do not know why this happened. I will not tell you what it was for.

And I am not going to make you count your blessings. Nobody has the right to hand a man an inventory this week, and I am not going to walk you through what you still have as though the arithmetic were the comfort. What is gone is gone, and you are allowed to feel every ounce of it.

The Word That Was Standing Before the House Was Bought

There is a psalm that is really one long letter about the word of God, and in the middle of it a man who has lost a great deal says something plain about where that word is kept.

For ever, O LORD, thy word is settled in heaven. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast established the earth, and it abideth.Psalm 119:89-90

Settled. It is the word for a post driven upright and left standing, a thing set in place on purpose and not leaning. And notice where it is settled. Not in his circumstances. Not in his household, his reputation, his health, his employment or his address. In heaven, which is another way of saying: out of reach of the removal van.

You have not lost the thing that was actually holding you up, and it was never in the house. That is not a sentiment I am offering you. Psalm 119:89 puts the word somewhere no phone call on the ninth can get at it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that somewhere feel near to a man standing in a room that is half packed.

Then the psalm does something you would not expect. It moves from heaven to dirt. Thy faithfulness is unto all generations: thou hast established the earth, and it abideth. The same hand that settled the word settled the ground, and the ground is still doing what it was told. You are standing on something this evening that was established long before your name was on any deed, and it is still abiding under your shoes. That is what stands written, and the Spirit of God is the one who brings a written thing down into a man's actual kitchen.

Now, a warning, because people will bring you Hebrews 12 this month. Some of them will use it kindly and some of them will use it to tell you that what you lost had to go, that it was shaken out on purpose, that it was never worth keeping anyway. I am not going to say that to you. I do not know that, and neither do they. You were not sent this in order to be taught something, and you are not required to find the lesson in it before you are allowed to be comforted. His word says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and the Spirit is called the Comforter, which is a job description and not a hint.

What Was Never in the Removal Van

So what is left. Not the list. I said I would not give you the list.

What is left is a word that was upright before the crash and is upright now, and a Person attached to it. You have the same covenant this evening that you had in January, unamended, unreduced, with nothing struck out of it by anything that happened on the ninth. Psalm 119:89 says for ever, and for ever is a word that does not get renegotiated by a quarter's trading figures, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that fact from being merely a nice idea in a man's head.

You have not been downgraded. Nothing that has left your house has changed what God says about the man laying that cloth, because His word was settled in heaven before the cloth was bought and the same Spirit who breathed it is standing in the room while you fold it.

Which brings me to the part where it helps to see it happen to somebody else.