He Set a Table and Called It a Table

Tonight is one pan of pasta, made for one person, and I want you to make it properly.

Get the water genuinely boiling and salt it until it tastes of the sea, which is the single biggest difference between pasta at home and pasta somewhere good. While it cooks, warm a good glug of oil in a pan with garlic sliced thin, gently, so the garlic goes pale gold and never brown. Keep a cup of the pasta water. Drain, tip the pasta into the garlic pan, add a splash of that water and stir it hard for thirty seconds so it goes glossy. A tin of tuna or a tin of beans in there if you want it more substantial. Pepper, and anything green.

Eight minutes. One pan and a pot. And it is a proper plate of food.

Now the reason for this one.

There is a particular thing that happens to people who live alone, and it happens slowly enough that nobody notices it happening. You stop cooking. Not all at once. First you stop cooking on the tired days, and then you stop laying anything, and then you are eating standing at the counter out of the pan with the light off in the next room, and it has been like that for a while.

And if somebody asked, you would say it is not worth it for one.

He prepares a table

There is a line in the twenty-third Psalm that everybody knows and almost nobody reads slowly.

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, King James Version)

A table. Before me. Singular.

There is nobody else at it. Read the whole psalm and count the people: there is a shepherd and there is one sheep, and at the end there is a host and there is one guest, and the host lays a table anyway.

He does not put out a tray. He does not say that one person does not justify the effort. He prepares a table, which is a deliberate and slightly formal word, for an audience of one, and then He pours until the cup spills over, which is not a portion size anybody would call sensible.

You are somebody God lays a table for, and one guest has never once been too few to justify the trouble. Psalm 23:5 has a host prepare a table before one person and then overfill the cup, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an extravagance like that feel personal rather than general.

What the standing is actually about

I want to name what eating standing up really is, because I do not think it is convenience.

It is a small daily verdict.

Sitting down is what you do for a meal that counts, for a person who counts, on an occasion that counts. Standing at the counter is what you do with something that is merely fuel. And when it is only you, it is very easy to slide into treating yourself as an occasion not worth the chair, and to do that every evening for years without ever once putting it into words.

Nobody is being cruel to you. That is the part that makes it hard to see. You are simply the only one in the building, so you are also the only one who could have decided you were worth a plate, and you have been quietly voting no.

You are worth the chair, and God has never once treated a household of one as a lesser occasion. The written word says thou preparest a table before me, and the Spirit of God is the one who can overturn a verdict a person has been passing on themselves every evening for years.

This is not about finding people

Let me say plainly what I am not doing, because articles about living alone almost always do it and it makes things worse.

I am not telling you the answer is to have more people. Maybe more people would be good and maybe you would like that. But if the message tonight is that a table only becomes real when somebody else sits at it, then I have just agreed with the thing that has kept you standing at the counter, and I have made it worse by putting God's name on it.

The psalm does not say the table becomes a table when the guests arrive. It says He prepares it, for one, and that it is already a table.

You are not in a waiting room. You are in your life, and tonight is a real evening in it.

You are living an actual life tonight, and it has never once been a rehearsal for a fuller one. Psalm 23:5 has the whole hospitality of God arranged around a single person, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary Tuesday evening on your own into something with weight in it.