Lay Only the Places You Have

Tonight it is a tray, and the whole point of it is that you can make it any size.

Potatoes cut small, an onion in wedges, whatever root vegetable is in the bottom of the fridge, and sausages if you have them. Oil, salt, into a hot oven on one tray, and turn it once about halfway. It takes forty minutes and almost none of that is your time. If there are sausages or any meat in there, cut one open at the end and make sure it is cooked right through before you serve it.

Here is the part I want to say carefully. Cut the potatoes for the number of people who will actually eat.

That sounds like nothing. For some of you it is the hardest sentence on this page.

Because there is a kind of household where the maths has stopped matching the room. Five was the number for eighteen years. Then somebody went to university, or somebody left, or somebody died, and there have been three for two years now, and every single time you stand at that counter your hands cut for five.

He sat down with two

There is a meal in Luke that I think about more than almost any other, and it is a very small one.

Two men walking to a village, on the worst afternoon of their lives, talking about a death. A stranger joins them and walks the whole way. And when they get there it is late and they ask Him in, and this happens.

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. (Luke 24:30, King James Version)

Two men. One table. A small supper in a small house in a village nobody had heard of.

That is not the upper room and it is not the five thousand. There is no crowd and no miracle of multiplication and nobody is counting. It is three people and some bread, and it is the meal where they finally see who He is.

You are sitting at a table He sits down at, and He has never once required a crowd before He would come in. Luke 24:30 has the risen Christ break bread for two men in a village house, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a small table feel occupied rather than emptied.

Cooking for a ghost

I want to name what the extra portion actually is, because I do not think it is absent-mindedness.

It is a way of keeping the table the shape it used to be. If I cut for five, then for the forty minutes that tray is in the oven, this is still a house of five. The correction comes later, at the counter, when I am scraping the extra into a tub. And I would rather have the forty minutes.

I understand that completely and I am not going to talk anybody out of it in one article. But I want to say what it costs, gently.

It costs the three who are actually there. Because a table laid for five with three at it is a table that is announcing an absence all through the meal, and the people sitting at it have to eat with that in the room, and most of them will never mention it.

You are feeding the people who are here, and they have never once been a smaller version of your family. Luke 24:30 has a full meal happen between three people at one small table, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person love who is in the room without being disloyal to who is not.

What I am not saying

Let me be plain about the thing I am not doing here, because grief articles go wrong at exactly this point.

I am not telling you to move on. I am not telling you the smaller table is better, or that you should be grateful for it, or that there is a lesson in it. If the reason your table shrank is that somebody died, then nothing about this is fine and I am not going to dress it as though it were.

And I am not promising the table fills again. Some do. Some do not. Nobody honest can tell you which.

What I am saying is much smaller. Tonight, cut for three. Lay three. Eat with the three.

That is not letting go of anybody. It is refusing to make the people in front of you eat a meal that is mostly about somebody who is not there.

You are allowed to lay three places without it being a betrayal, and grief has never once required a spare plate to be real. The written word says He sat at meat with them and brake it and gave it, in a house with two, and the Holy Spirit is the one who holds a loss and a supper in the same room without either one canceling the other.