The Figs on the Windowsill

He cooks on a Friday, and he cooks the whole thing.

Not because anybody is coming. Nobody is coming. He cooks it because in his mother's house Friday meant the table went out to its full length, and the quantities live in his hands and have never come down. Rice for six. A pot that wants three hours and gets them. Bread, torn, in a bowl with a cloth over it.

He lays the table. He is not casual about this either. The cloth goes on, and the good plate, and a glass, and a small dish of salt, and the bowl of figs, and it takes him ten minutes and it looks like a photograph of somebody's Friday.

Then he fills a plate and carries it to the counter and eats standing up.

Nine minutes, maybe. Hip against the cupboard, plate in his left hand, facing the door.

Behind him the table sits laid, with the food on it, going cold under the lamp. Afterwards he covers what is left and puts it in the fridge and takes the cloth off and folds it, and the whole thing goes away until the following Friday, when he does it again.

He has never once eaten a meal at that table.

If you asked him he would say he does not like to sit for long. That is not it. Standing up, a man can put a plate down and be at the door in four steps. Sitting down at a laid table with a cloth on it is a thing a man does when he is sure nothing is coming.

And there are the figs.

He bought a whole box of them because the man at the stall had one open and they smelled the way they smelled at home, and he carried the box back on the bus on his knees like something breakable. That was eleven days ago. He has eaten four.

They are on the windowsill going soft. He moves them, sometimes, from the sill to the counter and back to the sill. He could not tell you why he has not eaten them.

But there is a thing he has noticed in himself and does not like, which is that when they finally go over, there will be a small sour relief. Because then the question is closed. Then it is not a thing he might have enjoyed and did not.

Now let me stop calling him he.

Because you have your own box on the sill. Maybe it is an actual box of something you keep not opening. Maybe it is a Saturday with nothing in it, or a good chair nobody sits in, or an invitation you have said yes to and are already working out how to be near the door at.

Come in. Nothing here is going to be taken off the table.

The table is set while they are still watching

I want to start where the psalm actually starts, because the version of it in your head has probably had a bit removed.

You set a table before me in the sight of those who press against me. You anoint my head with oil. My cup overflows. Surely only goodness and covenant love will pursue me all the days of my life, and I will dwell in the house of the Lord for the length of my days.Psalm 23, verses 5 and 6

Read the first line again slowly. The table is not set after the danger clears the room. It is set in front of him while the ones pressing against him are standing there watching him eat. Nobody is asked to leave first, and the psalm does not pretend they have.

That is the whole thing, and it is the opposite of what you have been waiting for.

You have been holding out for a table that means the pressing has stopped. Psalm 23:5 offers no such table, and the Holy Spirit did not put a safer one in the text for people who prefer it. What is offered is a meal laid out in the open with everything still where it was.

So the good on your cloth is not evidence about your circumstances. It is not a signal. It is not a hand held out to see whether you will fall for it.

I have no standing to tell you that this steady patch will hold. Nobody does, and I am not going to be the man who trades you a chair for a promise I cannot keep. Psalm 23:6 has standing, and look what it actually claims: goodness and covenant love pursue him all the days of his life. Not the good days. All of them, which is a phrase that has the bad ones inside it, and the Spirit is the one carrying that word into a kitchen on a Friday night with the lamp on over a cold pot.

The word in that line is a hunting word.

It is what you do to something you are chasing down, and in the psalm it is mercy that does the chasing and the man who is the one being run after. You are the pursued one here. That is written, in the sixth verse, and His Spirit has been at your shoulder every Friday for two years, on the ones where you cooked and on the ones where you did not.

Now let me name what actually taught you to stand.

You were taught, correctly, in a place where it was true, that a man at a laid table is a man who is slow to leave. That was not paranoia and it was not a defect. It was accurate, in that room, in those years, and it kept somebody alive, and there is not one line in Scripture that asks a man to be ashamed of a reflex like that. It is a coat for weather that is not falling here, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you demanding you take it off. He is showing you where the hook is.

I am not going to tell you that the hard years were teaching you something. They were not. They happened, and the standing came out of them, and I refuse to hand the suffering a job in order to make the standing tidy.

What I will tell you is where the cup is.

Psalm 16:5 says the Lord is my portion and my cup, You hold my lot in Your hand. Your cup is not the figs and it is not the pot and it is not this good year. You have Him as your portion, which is why the figs can be eaten without the eating becoming a bet on the future, and the Spirit is the one who makes that distinction land in a man's chest rather than just in his head.

And there is nothing shifty about the giving.

James 1:17 says every good gift and every perfect gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. No variation. The bowl on the cloth did not come from a God who is in one mood on Friday and another on Monday, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been quietly pressing that at you since the bus ride home with the box on your knees.