Wednesday Night, The Same Table

Wednesdays, the corner table by the window, four years running.

Five of them. The quiz starts at half eight and they are always there by eight because the good table goes fast. They have a team name that started as a joke about somebody's car and is now simply their name. They have come third twice and won once, which they still talk about.

She loves these people. That is the whole difficulty.

Kate, who is the funniest person she has ever met and who has been quietly unhappy since a thing in the spring. Marcus, who is unbelievably kind and has never said so about himself. Priya, who knows everything about birds. Dan, who she suspects is lonelier than any of them and who is always the first to arrive.

She is the only one who prays. As far as she knows she is the only one who has ever prayed. And in four years she has not said one sentence at that table that indicates it.

There has never been hostility. That would be easier, honestly. There has just been a general drift in the conversation, once or twice a year, toward religion as a subject on the news, and she has nodded along, and it has moved on.

What she said to herself in the car park after the last one, and it is the sentence I want to look at, was: "It would be a whole thing."

Meaning: if I say it, it becomes The Thing About Her. Meaning: four years of being simply one of five becomes something else, and she cannot get the shape of what.

Salt goes in food somebody is already eating

Paul writes a line about how believers talk to people outside the church, and the metaphor is so ordinary that it gets read as decoration when it is actually the entire instruction.

Let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, that ye may know how ye ought to answer every man.Colossians 4:6

Take that at the corner table. You have salt in your speech already and nobody asked you for a plate of it. The word says let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt, and it is the Holy Spirit who supplies both the measure and the moment.

Seasoned with salt.

Think about what salt is and how it is used. It is not a course. Nobody serves it. It goes into food that somebody is already eating, in a small quantity, and its whole job is to make the thing they were already having taste more like itself.

You cannot serve somebody a plate of salt. That is the thing that has frightened you for four years, and you are right to be frightened of it, because it would be unpleasant and it would not work and everybody at that table would be kind about it and something would be different afterward.

Nobody has asked you for a plate of salt. The instruction was a pinch, in the conversation that is already happening.

So take this at that table, and know it is not my advice, it is what is written: your speech has salt in it already, right now, this Wednesday. His word says let your speech be always with grace, seasoned with salt, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the seasoning, which means the measure is not yours to worry about.

There was a preacher in England in the seventeen hundreds who went outdoors because the people he wanted would not come indoors, and everyone pictures him at a pit head with thousands in front of him.

He also spent an enormous amount of his life in ordinary rooms with a handful of people, talking about their week.

His whole method depended on speech in the middle of ordinary life. Small groups asking plain questions out loud. Visits. Conversations at a bedside and in a shop and on a road. The field preaching was the doorway; the actual movement was made of people who talked normally about God in the places they already spent their evenings.

He never spoke against the gathered church, which he loved and never left. He simply did not accept that a conversation about God required a special venue and a special voice.

Your corner table on a Wednesday is exactly the room he was working in.