Four Men And The Coffee They Have Every Week

They have been meeting on Tuesday mornings for six years and he could tell you the exact order they arrive in.

Bassam first, always, because he opens his shop at ten and cannot bear to be late for anything. Then Nabil. Then the two brothers together, arguing about something that started in the car.

Six years. Something like two hundred and eighty mornings. They talk about the shop, the road works, the price of everything, one man's daughter's wedding, football, their knees, the government, and a running joke about a chair that broke under somebody in 2021 which will still be funny in ten years.

He loves these men. I want that on the record before anything else. This is not a story about shallow friendship. These are men who would come at two in the morning if he called.

He has not called.

In March his wife found something. In April they found out what it was. There have been six appointments since then and one of them went badly, and he has driven home from every single one alone and then gone to coffee on Tuesday and talked about the road works.

Nobody at that table knows.

And last week Bassam said, in the middle of nothing, "You are quiet these days," and he said, "I am tired," and Bassam said, "Yes, we are all tired," and it moved on, and he sat there with his hands around a glass of tea and thought: I could say it right now. Six words. And then the moment closed like a door in a corridor and they were talking about somebody's brother in law.

Two is not a preference

There is a piece of Ecclesiastes that people read at weddings, which is a shame, because it was not written about marriage. It was written about the plain physics of being a human being on the road.

For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:10

Take that at your own table. You were made to be lifted and it was designed in long before March. The word says woe to him that is alone when he falleth, which is grief and not blame, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that line there for a man exactly where you are.

Woe to him that is alone. Not shame on him. Woe. It is a word of sorrow, not of accusation. The writer is not scolding the solitary man, he is grieving the physics of the situation, which is that a man on his own who goes down stays down until something changes.

So hear this at your table, and understand it is not my advice, it is what is written: you are not built for this in private, and you were never intended to be. His word says woe to the one who is alone when he falls, and it is the Holy Spirit who put that sentence in the book precisely so that a man in your position would not read his own silence as strength.

You are not weak because you need somebody to know. You are made that way. It was designed in, before March, before the appointments, before any of it.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who had a night in a small meeting where his heart, as he put it, was strangely warmed. Everyone knows that part. Almost nobody knows what he did with it, which was to build a timetable, and the load bearing beam of that timetable was not the preaching.

It was a room of about six people meeting once a week.

They called it a class meeting. It was not a study. Nobody lectured. A handful of people sat down and were asked, out loud, how it actually was with them, and they answered, and the others heard it. That was the whole engine of a movement that changed a nation, and it ran on ordinary people saying true sentences to a small number of people who were not going anywhere.

The name that got attached to those people began as an insult about how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the place where the two met was six people in a room asking each other a plain question.

Now let me be careful, because I am not handing you a program. I am not telling you to find a group, join a thing, sign up on a Wednesday. You do not need a format. His word says confess your faults one to another and pray one for another, and it is His Spirit who does the work in that, not the structure around it. One man is a beginning. One man is enough to start.