The Table He Set Anyway

His father went to that Tuesday morning study for thirty one years and there is a photograph somewhere of him at the end of a diner booth with a coffee, taken by somebody who was clearly not trying to take a photograph of him.

In the last week, when there was not much left to say, the old man said: take my chair Tuesdays. That is all. Not a speech. He was not a speech man.

And he said he would. He said it with the same hand on the same blanket everybody uses in that situation, and he meant it entirely, and he told God so on the drive back that night in words he does not repeat.

He went twice.

The first time was ten days after the funeral, and everybody was kind and nobody knew what to say to him and he did not know what to say to them, and he drank a coffee and went to work. The second time was three weeks later and it was easier, and afterward he sat in his truck in the lot and cried for about four minutes, and that, apparently, was that.

Eleven years.

He drives past that diner on the way to the site. Tuesday mornings there are eight or nine trucks in the lot at half past six and he knows most of them by their tailgates.

And what he believes, though he has never put it in a sentence, is that the chair got folded. Not literally; it is a booth. He means that a place is a thing men keep for you for a while, out of respect for a dead father, and then the weeks go by and the group closes up the way a field closes over a track nobody walks, and after eleven years there is no track.

You may have a chair like that. And you may have decided, on no evidence at all, that a place unoccupied for long enough stops being a place.

Whose hands set the table

Now, everybody knows the psalm. That is the trouble with it. It gets said over coffins until it stops being a sentence and becomes a sound.

So read this line as if you had never seen it, and pay attention to who is doing the work in it.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

You are eating at a table God lays with His own hands, in full view of everything that says you should not be there. Psalm 23:5 says thou preparest in the present tense, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept that place laid for eleven years.

Thou preparest

Not: a table is prepared. Not: there is a table. Thou preparest. It is His hands, and it is present tense, and it is happening while the psalm is being spoken.

And look at the circumstances He does it in. In the presence of mine enemies. That is not a comfortable dinner in a safe room. That is a table set out in the open, in front of everything that is against the man eating at it, which is a deliberate and almost provocative act. He sets it where it can be seen. He sets it where the man's enemies have to watch him eat.

You are eating at a table that God Himself lays, and He lays it in full view of everything that says you should not be there. Psalm 23:5 is where that is written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a funeral card and puts it in a truck in a diner parking lot on a Tuesday.

Here is what that does to your question. You have been asking whether eight or nine men in a booth kept a place for a man who came twice eleven years ago. And the honest answer is that men do not do that, and they should not be expected to, and nobody has been holding a booth for a decade out of loyalty to your father.

But that was never the table this psalm is about. The one being set is set by God, and the setting is present tense, and the only qualification named anywhere in the psalm is that the Lord is the man's shepherd.

You have a place laid for you this morning by hands that have never once cleared a setting because somebody was late. His word says it and does not soften it, and that is the plain sense of thou preparest, and the Spirit of God is the one who has kept it laid for eleven years while you drove past.

What the chair actually was

And now let me say something about your father, gently.

He did not give you a job in the last week of his life. He gave you a way of being with people, which is the only thing he had left to give and the best thing he had.

Take my chair Tuesdays means: do not do this alone. It means: I found something that held me for thirty one years and I would like it to hold you. That is a father handing over a warm thing, not a father assigning a duty with a compliance schedule attached.

So when you failed to go, what you did was not a default. It was a grief. You could not sit in a booth where a man's absence was the loudest thing in the room, and I do not think there is a soul alive who would call that a moral failure, except you.

You are a son who could not sit down for a while, and that is not the same species of thing as a man who lost a place. Scripture puts the setting of this table in God's hands and puts nothing at all in yours, and the Spirit of God has been keeping the chair through eleven years you spent on the wrong side of a windshield.