The Invitation Nobody Accepts

She books the room and does the food and sends it to everybody.

Both lists. Same message. Same day. No explanation, no special note to anybody, nothing that could be read as pressure by a person looking for pressure.

She has got better at it over four years. She has stopped putting anything hopeful in the wording, because the year she did that was the year it hurt the most.

She sent it again this year.

She knew. That is what makes it strange to explain to anybody. She was not optimistic and she was not naive and she would have told you, if you had asked her that morning, exactly who was going to come.

And she set out thirty chairs anyway and did the whole afternoon and it was lovely, and the same people came who always come, and neither of them was in the room.

Here is what nobody knows.

She counts.

There is a number in her head every year. It is not a number she has ever written down and she would be embarrassed if anybody knew she had it, and it is the number of people who came from that half of the family, and it has been zero four years running.

And she does the entire afternoon perfectly. She is warm and she is funny and she means every bit of it, and nobody at that table has any idea.

And then she goes home and sits in the car for about ten minutes before she goes in.

If you keep setting a table nobody comes to, sit down at this one. The trifle has collapsed and nobody here is counting anything.

What the psalm actually does

There is a psalm about unity that everybody can quote, and the thing worth noticing is what kind of sentence it is.

Behold, how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity!Psalm 133:1

Behold.

That is not an instruction to arrange anything. It is a man pointing. He is looking at something, or imagining it, and telling you to look at it too, and the whole psalm is about how good it is rather than about how to bring it about.

There is no method in it. There is no timetable. Nobody is told to organize it, nobody is blamed for its absence, and there is not one word about what to do when it does not happen.

It is a longing, written down and set to music and kept.

You are holding a longing that Scripture wrote down and never once turned into an assignment. Psalm 133:1 says behold rather than arrange and gives no method and no timetable at all, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept it as a thing to look at rather than a thing to achieve, which means four years of sending an invitation has never been four years of failing at something.

What the invitation is and is not

Now the message itself, because it has quietly changed meaning in your own head and it should be changed back.

You have started reading it as an attempt: something you try, which then succeeds or fails, and which has failed four times. That is not what it is. An invitation is a door left open. Whether anybody walks through it is not part of the invitation, and it never was.

You have been keeping a door open rather than running an attempt, and a door that nobody uses is still an open door. Revelation 3:20 says behold, I stand at the door, and knock, and it pictures somebody waiting outside a door rather than forcing it, and it is the same Spirit who draws a person, which means the posture you have held for four years is the posture God Himself takes and it is not a strategy that has not worked.

The ten minutes in the car

Here is the part nobody knows about, and it deserves to be treated as real rather than as something to get past.

Ten minutes in a car, four years running.

That is grief, done privately, immediately after doing an afternoon perfectly for thirty other people. It has no witnesses and it has never been mentioned and nobody has ever thanked anybody for it.

You were grieving in a car with nobody to see it, and it has been seen the whole time. Psalm 56:8 says thou tellest my wanderings, put thou my tears into thy bottle, are they not in thy book, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept a verse that physical rather than a more dignified one, which means four years of ten minutes has been counted somewhere and none of it went unwitnessed.