Six Years Of Eating At His Table

Six years, and he has never once paid for a meal in that house, and he has never once been allowed to.

His neighbor is a man who cooks for people the way other men mow a lawn: because it is Saturday, because it needs doing, because what else would you do. There have been a hundred meals, perhaps more. There have been two funerals in that kitchen and one wedding photograph pinned to the fridge for eleven months because nobody framed it.

They know each other's children. They have driven each other to the airport. Last winter, when the boiler went, his neighbor came at eleven at night with a heater and stayed till one, and they did not talk much, and it was one of the kindest things anybody has done for him.

God has never been mentioned in that house.

Not once, in six years, in either direction. Not in a hostile way. It simply has not come up, and he has arranged, without ever admitting it to himself, for it to not come up.

He has reasons and they are all decent ones. He does not want to make it strange. He does not want the man to think the friendship has an agenda under it, because it does not. He has watched people be treated as projects and it disgusted him and he swore he would never do it.

So he eats the bread, six years of it, and drives home, and says nothing.

And underneath the decency there is a smaller thing he does not look at directly. He is not sure he would know how to begin without it sounding like a pitch, and a man who is not sure how to begin will always find a reason to be respectful instead.

Stay in that house and eat what they give you

When Jesus sends seventy people out ahead of Him, the instructions are strange and specific and almost nothing in them is about speaking.

And in the same house remain, eating and drinking such things as they give: for the labourer is worthy of his hire. Go not from house to house.Luke 10:7

Hear that in that kitchen. You have been obeying the hard half of that instruction for six years. The word says in the same house remain, eating such things as they give, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at that table through every meal.

Remain. Eat what they give you. Do not move around.

They were sent to receive hospitality before they gave anything at all. To be fed by the household. To stay long enough that a relationship existed, and specifically not to work through a district collecting doorsteps.

You have obeyed the hard part of that instruction for six years. You have remained. You have eaten such things as he gives. You have not gone from house to house.

So take this in that kitchen, and know it is not my flattery, it is what is written: you are already doing the thing you were sent to do, and the eating was never a delay before the real work. His word says remain in that house, eating and drinking such things as they give, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been at that table for six years, in every meal, doing something you have not been able to see.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who is remembered for preaching outside, and everyone pictures a field with a crowd in it. That happened. But look at what he actually did most days.

He went to where people already were, in the shape their lives already had.

Coal mines at five in the morning, because that is when a shift came up. Market squares on market day. Prisons, endlessly, at whatever hour they let him in. He was not moving people into his setting. He was standing in theirs, at their hour, on their terms, and he did it for fifty years.

Not a technique. Not a quota. And nothing in it against the gathered church, which he loved and never left. Simply the plain recognition that the people he wanted to reach were not going to walk into a building, and that this was not a problem to be solved but a geography to be obeyed.

Your neighbor's kitchen is his field. You are already in it. You have a standing invitation to the exact place a man like that would have walked twelve miles to get into.