The Gladness He Cannot Manufacture

Fourteen chairs, and he has counted them twice.

The table is two tables pushed together with a cloth over the join so nobody can see it, and the join sits under the middle, where his aunt will sit, which is fine because she will not notice. He has set fourteen places. The glasses are the ones from the top shelf, washed this morning because of the dust. There is a jug of water with lemon in it that nobody will drink. The afternoon light is coming in low along the whole length of the table and lighting the rim of every glass, one after another, all the way down, and it is genuinely beautiful, and he is looking at it the way a man looks at a hill he has to climb.

They come at four.

He has done this every year since his father died, and he does it well. He knows who cannot sit beside whom. He knows his cousin will ask about the job, and he has a version of the answer ready that is true and short. He knows there will be a moment around six when somebody says something about his mother and the room will go careful, and he will be the one who says the next thing, because he is always the one who says the next thing.

The trouble is not the day. The trouble is that twenty minutes ago he stood in the kitchen holding a stack of side plates and could not remember why he had picked them up. He has nothing. Not sadness exactly, and not anger either. He is scraped. Whatever it is that a person draws on to walk into a room and be pleasant, he has been drawing on it for two years without a break, and this morning the bucket came up dry and he heard it hit the bottom.

And the sentence that came up with the empty bucket is the one he would not say out loud to anybody arriving at four. Whatever I used to be made of, I am not made of it anymore.

He put the plates down. He came in here and finished the table, because the table is the part he can do with his hands.

Now he is standing at the end of it, in the light, with fourteen empty chairs and forty minutes.

A strong place, not a mood

Let me name it before I say one word about strength, because you will not name it and nobody arriving at four is going to name it for you.

You are not low on enthusiasm. You are scraped out. There is a difference and the difference matters, because the world keeps offering you a fix for the first thing when what has happened to you is the second. Two years, or five, or however long it has been, of being the one who says the next thing. It has a cost. Nobody has ever put a number on that cost, and because nobody put a number on it you have quietly decided it does not have one, and then you have looked at your own empty bucket and concluded something ugly about yourself.

Nothing is wrong with you. You have been carrying a room for a long time with nothing coming back the other way.

Now let me put the verse in front of you, and I want the whole of it, because half of it has been used on you for years.

Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

Look at who is standing there when that is said. Not a rested people. Ezra had read the Law aloud from morning until midday to a crowd who had not heard it in a generation, and they had understood it, and they had wept. That is the room. Everybody in it is undone. And into that room comes a sentence that has since been printed on a thousand things and handed to tired people as a job.

It was never a job. Read the last clause again in the Hebrew's own terms. The word carrying strength there is not a word for energy or output or grit. It is ma'oz, and it is a noun of place: a stronghold, a fortified height, the walled town you run into when the country is not safe. The joy of the Lord is your stronghold. His gladness is a place with walls, and the invitation is to go inside it, not to produce it.

You are standing inside a strong place that your own gladness did not build. I am not saying that to lift you. It is what Nehemiah 8:10 actually says, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a fortified height and makes it a real floor under a man at the end of a table with forty minutes left.

That is the whole difference. Fuel has to be generated and it runs out. A stronghold is somewhere you walk. Nobody has ever been asked to manufacture a wall in order to shelter behind it.

You have His gladness as a place to stand in, and it was a place long before it was ever a feeling. The written word calls it a stronghold, not a mood, and it is the Spirit of God who carries that from the page into a body with nothing in it, on an afternoon when the light on the glasses is beautiful and it is not touching you.

Portions for the one who has nothing

Now the part of the verse nobody quotes, which is the part with your name in it.

Send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared.

Somewhere in that assembly stood a person who had brought nothing and had nothing at home. No feast, no fat, no sweet, nothing to go back to. And the instruction for that holy day was not that the person should go and find some. It was that portions be carried to them, by other people, because the day belonged to the Lord and nobody was going to be left standing empty in it.

You are hosting today. You are also that person, and both are true at the same table.

You are the one for whom nothing was prepared, and a portion is being carried to you rather than asked from you. It is written into the same verse that has been quoted at you for years, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a line about an assembly in Jerusalem land on a man standing among fourteen empty chairs.

I want to be careful now, because there is a move your mind will make with all this and it is the wrong one. It will hear stronghold and translate it into so you should feel better, and then when four o'clock arrives and you do not feel better you will decide the whole thing failed and that the failure is yours. It is not, and it did not. Sheltering inside walls is not the same as being cheerful, and the verse does not promise you a mood by teatime. It tells you where the walls are.

And I am not handing you the whole afternoon. I have nothing to say about six o'clock, or about the careful silence when somebody mentions your mother, or about the cars leaving at ten. What I have for you is four until five. The door, the first coats, the first round of tea, the first cousin with the first question. That much.

You have strength for the first hour of it, and the first hour is the only thing being asked of you. That is Nehemiah 8:10 in the present tense, and it is His Spirit who carries it into your arms and your voice for exactly as long as you need it and no longer.