I Can Feed Forty And Say Nothing

Forty people came through that yard on a Saturday and every single one of them left full and not one of them left with anything else.

He knows it, too. That is the thing.

He is famous for it in a small way. If there is an event, he is asked. If somebody dies, he is the one who turns up with the enormous dish and stays and washes everything and goes home. If a family is having a hard month, food appears and nobody has to ask.

And he cannot say a sentence.

Not cannot exactly. He can talk all day, he is not shy, that yard is loud when he is in it. He means a particular kind of sentence: a true one, about God, said out loud at his own table, without a joke on the end of it.

He tried once, about four years ago. He got about six words in and heard his own voice and turned it into something else and nobody at that table noticed anything at all.

He has not tried since.

And on the Saturday, at about eleven at night, with the last pan drying and the yard empty and the lights still up, he said to himself: I feed them and I never tell them anything.

You know that yard.

Maybe you are the practical one. Maybe you do the lifts, or the shopping, or you turn up when somebody is ill, and you have quietly decided that this is your part and words are for other people. Maybe somebody told you once that your serving is your witness, which is kind and true and has also let you off for eleven years.

Nobody is criticizing what you do. It is real work and it is love and this page is not about to call it a substitute for anything.

Where the recognizing happened

Here is the end of the road to Emmaus, and the timing of it is the whole thing.

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him.Luke 24:30-31

He had been teaching them for hours. Walking, explaining, going through the whole of it from Moses forward, and their eyes stayed shut through every mile of it.

And then supper. And He does the small ordinary thing that anybody at any table does with bread, and says something over it, and hands it round.

And that is where it happens. Not on the road. At the table, in the middle of a meal, in about four seconds.

You are running the exact setting where the opening happened, and it was not the lecture that did it. That is what the sequence in Luke says by putting hours of teaching before shut eyes and one broken loaf before open ones (Luke 24:30-31), and it is the Holy Spirit who does the opening in a person, which He appears to do around tables more often than around lecterns.

Six words, not a talk

Now the practical part, because your problem is not willingness.

What has stopped you is a picture of what saying something means. In that picture you stop the room, and everybody looks at you, and you say something substantial and well constructed, and there is a silence afterward that somebody has to break.

That is a talk. You are right to dread it and you would be bad at it and so would nearly everybody.

That is not what happened at Emmaus. He said something over bread and passed it on and the meal carried on. Nobody stopped. Nobody was invited to respond. It was the size of a sentence.

You are not required to give a talk in your own yard, and six words is the whole of what is being asked. Scripture says let your speech be alway with grace, seasoned with salt (Colossians 4:6), and salt is the smallest ingredient in any dish anybody ever made, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the seasoning, in real time, in a loud kitchen.

And nothing here hands you a form of words. You are not being given a script, and there is no correct wording anywhere in this. The word says out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaketh (Matthew 12:34), and it is the Holy Spirit who fills the abundance, which is why the six words that arrive on the night will be better than any six you could plan in advance.

What your food has already done

Before the turn, hear this, because you are about to be tempted to think eleven years were hollow.

They were not. Every single one of those dishes was a real thing that reached a real person on a hard week, and the God who notices a cup of cold water given in His name is not squinting at your yard trying to work out whether it counted.

You have not been hiding behind the food, and what you have done was love and not evasion. Scripture says whosoever shall give to drink unto one of these little ones a cup of cold water only in the name of a disciple, verily I say unto you, he shall in no wise lose his reward (Matthew 10:42), and His Spirit is the one who has been in that yard on every one of those Saturdays.

The six words are not a correction. They are an addition, and they cost nine seconds.