She Has Begun To Feel Foolish

She set it the first Christmas and she has set it ever since.

Six years. Every proper meal, which in that house means Sundays and the days that matter. Plate, glass, the good napkin, in the place where he used to sit, which is on the left with his back to the window.

For the first four years nobody said a word about it. It was simply how that table was laid, in the way that every family has arrangements nobody explains.

Something changed this year.

She caught herself hesitating over it, in October, with the plate in her hand.

And what she felt was not sadness. That is the strange part and it is the reason she has not been able to shake it.

She felt embarrassed. In her own kitchen. About a plate.

Here is where it came from, as far as she can tell.

Her son's girl asked whose place it was, perfectly innocently, in the way somebody new to a family asks about anything.

And her son said, oh, that is Nan's thing, and moved the bread.

He did not mean anything by it. He would be appalled if he knew. He is a good man and he says that sort of thing the way people do when they are protecting somebody from a long story at a table.

But she has not been able to put down the words Nan's thing.

Because Nan's thing is what a family calls an eccentricity. It is what you say about a habit that has stopped meaning anything and has become a feature of an old woman.

If something you have kept has started to feel foolish, sit down and pass the dish. Nobody at this table is looking at anything.

What He is not unrighteous to forget

There is a sentence written to people who were tired and beginning to wonder whether any of it registered anywhere.

For God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labour of love, which ye have shewed toward his name, in that ye have ministered to the saints, and do minister.Hebrews 6:10

God is not unrighteous to forget.

That is a strange construction and it is worth slowing down on. He does not say God remembers. He says forgetting would be unrighteous, which puts the whole thing on a different footing: the remembering is not a kindness God does when He has time, it is a matter of His character.

And look at what will not be forgotten. Your work and labor of love. Not achievements. Not results. Labor, which is effort that costs, and love, which is the reason it was spent.

Six years of a plate, laid by one pair of hands, for somebody who has not come, is a labor of love if anything on this earth is.

You are inside a verse where forgetting what you have done would be a violation of God's own character. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept that written to people who were nearly out of heart, which means six years of a clean plate is on a record that cannot be lost.

What the word thing did

Now the sentence at that table, and let us be careful, because your son is not the problem here and he is about to be treated as though he were.

He was protecting somebody. Probably you. A new girl asks a simple question and there is a six year story behind it, and he made the whole thing small and moved the bread, and that is what kind people do at tables.

What it did, without anybody intending it, was give the plate a new name.

And a thing, once named as somebody's thing, becomes a feature of a person rather than an act of love. That is what has been sitting on you since October.

You were renamed by a kind sentence, and the name it gave you is not the one that is on the record. 1 Samuel 16:7 says the Lord seeth not as man seeth, for man looketh on the outward appearance, but the Lord looketh on the heart, and it is written of a moment when the visible reading of a person was entirely wrong, and it is the same Spirit who searches the deep things, which means what that plate is has never been decided at that table.

Nobody is being summoned

Let us be plain about what this page will not do.

Nobody here is telling you to contact him. Nobody is telling you to write, to ring, to send a message through anybody, or to do anything at all involving that man.

This page does not know your situation and there may be excellent reasons for the last six years to be exactly as they have been.

You are not being instructed to reach anybody, and nothing here treats six years of distance as a failure on your part. Romans 12:18 says if it be possible, as much as lieth in you, live peaceably with all men, and it puts two limits into one sentence rather than issuing a command without them, and it is the same Spirit who works that peace in a person, which means what has been possible and what lies in you are both being taken into account.