Still Standing Near the Door

The invitation had come by phone, which was how she knew it was real. A card can be sent to everyone. A phone call is somebody deciding on you and then dialing.

So Ellen went. She washed her hair, she found the good shoes, and she drove out along the valley road in the last of the light with the paper the address was written on flattened on the passenger seat, although she had known the way for eleven years.

The hall was warmer than she expected. Candles were set down the middle of the long table in jars, a dozen of them, and the flames were leaning all one direction because someone had propped the far door open for the heat coming off the ovens. There were forty people in there. The noise went straight up into the rafters and came back down again, and somebody laughed near the fire in a way that made three other people laugh without knowing why.

Kate came over immediately with both hands out. "You came. Sit anywhere, we saved you one down the middle."

Ellen said thank you. She said it warmly and she meant it.

Then she stood by the coat pegs.

She kept her coat on. That was the first thing. It was not cold and she was not going anywhere, but the coat stayed on, and she stood with her back a foot from the door and her purse still over her shoulder, and she held a plate somebody had put into her hands with a slice of pie on it that she did not eat.

People came to her. That was the part that made it worse, in a way. They kept coming over, one at a time, standing with her, telling her the thing about the tractor and the thing about the twins, and she was good at this, she asked the right questions, she laughed at the right places, and the whole time some small clerk at the back of her head was running its ledger.

She was not standing there because she felt unwelcome. That was what she could not have explained to anyone in that room. She had been welcomed at the phone call, welcomed at the door, welcomed by name three separate times before the pie. She was standing there because being welcomed and being seated are two different things, and she had only ever been able to do the first one.

The chair was still empty. Down the middle, on the left, between Kate's mother and a boy of about nine with his sleeves pushed up. There was a plate at it. Somebody had put a fork and a knife across the plate and a folded cloth beside it, and nobody had moved the chair in for a different guest all evening, because it was hers.

At half past nine they started clearing. Ellen took her plate to the kitchen, washed it herself, told Kate it had been lovely, and drove home along the valley road with the heater on.

She had stood the entire evening two steps from a chair with her name at it, holding pie she never ate, in case somebody came over and asked her to leave.

He did not send for you, He came and got you

There is a particular tiredness that comes from standing all evening in a room where a chair was waiting. It is not the tiredness of being turned away. It is the tiredness of being let in and never landing.

The old song in Scripture says something quite strange about how a person ends up at a feast. It does not say she found the room. It does not say she qualified for the room, or made herself presentable enough for the room, or asked repeatedly until the room opened.

He brought me to the banqueting house, and his banner over me was love.Song of Solomon 2:4

He brought her. That verb is doing everything. The bringing was His action, start to finish, and she is simply the one who ended up inside.

You are in this room because God Himself walked you into it, and a guest who was carried in cannot be standing here on a technicality. Song of Solomon 2:4 says He brought her to the banqueting house, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line like that out of an ancient love song and lays it against a woman standing by the coat pegs with her purse still on her shoulder.

And then the banner. A banner in that world was not decoration and it was not a mood. It was the standard a household raised over its people so anyone looking from a distance could see whose they were. It went up over the ones who belonged, and it stayed up, and nobody at the feast had to keep checking whether it was still there.

You have a banner over you that was raised by the Host and not by your performance at His table. The written word says His banner over her was love, which means the thing declaring her identity in that room was hung by somebody else and hung on purpose. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that a fact you are standing under rather than a metaphor you are admiring.

Notice that the psalm most people reach for on this subject does not improve on it either. It says He prepares a table, He anoints the head, the cup runs over. Every verb belongs to the Shepherd. The guest brings an appetite and a chair takes her weight, and that is the whole of the guest's contribution to the evening.

The chair is not on probation

Here is what the clerk at the back of your head has been doing all these years. It has been treating the welcome as provisional. As something extended on the strength of good behavior at the door, renewable, and therefore revocable if you sit down too comfortably or laugh too loudly or take a second helping in front of everybody.

That clerk is not being careful. It is being wrong, and it is wrong about the character of the One who invited you.

You were seated before you arrived, and the seating was decided in a room you were not in. Ephesians 1:4 says He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, which is a decision made a long way upstream of your conduct at supper. The Holy Spirit is the One who carries that written line down out of theology and into a stone hall on a Tuesday evening, where a chair with a folded cloth beside it has been sitting empty for three hours.

I want to slow down here, because this is where the meal usually gets turned into a symbol and the reader goes home hungry.

The table in Scripture is a real table. There is food on it. The bread was bread, the fish were fish, the cup was a cup you could knock over. When the Lord fed thousands on a hillside He did not hand out an idea about provision, He handed out lunch, and the account bothers to mention that everyone was filled and there were baskets left over. God is not squeamish about actual satisfaction. He is the one who invented it.

So the table set for you tonight is not a figure of speech that you are supposed to feel encouraged by. It is a meal. This is yours: a plate, a chair with your weight on it, and an evening you are inside of rather than beside. Psalm 23:5 says He prepares a table, and the preparing is finished before the guest ever comes through the door. The Holy Spirit is the One who serves what the Father prepared, and He is not waiting for you to earn a second helping.