A Table For One Is Still A Table

She has lived alone for nine years and she is not lonely, and she found the actual problem on a Thursday standing at the fridge.

She was deciding whether to bother.

That is the phrase she used in her own head, and it stopped her, because bother is a word about other people. You bother for other people. And she stood there with the fridge open working out that she has, for about seven years, eaten standing up when nobody is coming and laid a table when somebody is.

And it went further, the way these things do at a fridge on a Thursday.

She goes on Sundays and she is fully there and something happens in her, genuinely. She meets a friend on a Wednesday and prays with her and that is real. She would tell you her faith is in good shape and she would be telling the truth.

And in nine years in this flat, on her own, in the hours that make up most of her actual life, she could not point to anything.

She said out loud, to a fridge: I think I have decided that nothing counts unless somebody sees it.

Not lonely. She wants that understood. She is fine and she has people and she is not sitting in the dark waiting for the phone.

It is a smaller and stranger thing than loneliness. It is that she has quietly filed her own solitary hours as the gaps between the parts of her life where anything is happening.

You know that fridge.

Maybe you live alone. Maybe you live with people and are alone for most of the day anyway. Maybe you have noticed that you pray fine with others and go blank by yourself, and have assumed that means you are the kind of person who needs a group, which may be true and is not the whole story.

Nobody taught you this. It comes from the fact that almost everything anybody ever showed you about faith had other people in the room, because that is what you can show.

He named the room

Here is an instruction that names a specific location, and the location has exactly one person in it.

But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:6

Enter into thy closet. Shut thy door.

That is the smallest room in the house, with the door shut, with nobody there. It is not offered as a fallback for people who cannot get to a gathering. It is what He tells everybody to do, and He tells them to shut the door on purpose.

And read what is in that room with them. Thy Father which is in secret. Not: God will hear you from a distance. He is described as being there, in the secret place, which is exactly the location you have been filing as a gap.

You are in the room He named, and a shut door with one person behind it is where He sent everybody. That is what the verse specifies, a closet and a shut door and the Father who is in secret (Matthew 6:6), and it is the Holy Spirit who is described as dwelling in a person rather than appearing when a group forms, which is why your Thursday has never once been an interval.

The thing that gets shown is not the whole thing

Now here is why you learned this without anybody teaching it, and it is nobody's fault.

Everything about faith that can be demonstrated has other people in it. A meeting can be shown. A prayer with a friend on a Wednesday can be described. Singing with two hundred people is visible from the outside and photographs well.

An hour alone in a flat cannot be shown to anybody, so it does not appear in anybody's account of what a faith looks like, and after a while a person concludes that the parts which do not appear are not parts.

You have not been living in the gaps, and the hours nobody can see are not the leftovers of your life. Scripture says thy Father which seeth in secret (Matthew 6:6), and the verb is present and continuous, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a companionship rather than a surveillance, which is the whole difference between being seen and being watched.

And nothing on this page is a word against the Sunday or the Wednesday. You are not being told that gathering matters less, and no room in your life is being demoted here. The word says not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as the manner of some is (Hebrews 10:25), and His Spirit is in that room too, and both things are true and neither has to lose for the other to count.

And the table

Which brings it to the fridge and the deciding whether to bother.

A table laid for one is a table. It is not a rehearsal for the times when somebody comes. It is not a smaller version of the real thing that happens when there are four.

You are worth laying a table for, and the meal you eat alone is a meal and not a maintenance task. Scripture says whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), and there is no minimum number in that verse, and His Spirit is present at a table of one exactly as He is at a table of twelve.