I Eat Standing Up

He found out at his own table, which had a laptop bag on it, a folded ironing board leaning against it, and a stack of things that live there now.

He was looking for the car keys.

And he moved the bag and saw the actual surface of that table, which is a good table, and he could not remember the last meal he had eaten on it.

He worked backward while he stood there. Christmas, obviously. His sister at Easter. And before that a night when somebody stayed. Which is three times in two years, and every single one of them was because other people were in the house.

On his own, he eats standing up. At the counter with a plate. Over the sink, occasionally, which he would not tell anybody. In front of something, on the sofa, with the plate on his knee. In the car between two places.

He is not depressed. He would want that on the record. He is busy and he is fine and he has friends and he is not sitting in the dark.

He simply stopped sitting down about two years ago and never noticed, and now the table is where the ironing board lives.

And when he put the bag back on it and went out with the keys, the thought that followed him to the car was this: everything I do with God happens in a building too.

Standing up, moving, on the way somewhere. Never once sat at anything.

You know that counter.

Maybe you eat while doing something else. Maybe your table has become a desk or a landing strip for post. Maybe you sit down every day with a family and still eat with one eye on the clock, and the sitting is technical.

Nobody chose this. It is what happens to a person over about eighteen months of ordinary life, and there is nothing wrong with you, and no one is going to be told about the sink.

Read what He asked for

Here is a verse that gets quoted at people constantly, usually about conversion, and the second half of it almost never gets read out.

Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.Revelation 3:20

I will sup with him.

Not: I will speak to him. Not: I will do a work in him, or meet with him, or move upon him. He names a meal, and He names the ordinary evening one, the one at the end of a working day.

That is what is on offer at the door. Supper.

You are being asked to sit down to a meal, and the invitation at that door is not to a service. That is what sup means in the sentence it was written in, a shared evening meal (Revelation 3:20), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a real presence in an actual kitchen rather than a devotional idea, which is the difference between a verse on a card and somebody in the chair opposite.

And notice the mutuality at the end, which is the part that undoes people. I will sup with him, and he with me. Both directions. He is not coming to serve you and He is not coming to be served. He is coming to eat.

The building is not the problem

Let me say this before we go further, because this is exactly where a page like this could quietly turn into an argument, and it will not.

The building is good. Whatever building you go to, it is good, and the people who put out the chairs and make the coffee are doing something real, and none of this is a complaint about them or about you for being there.

Nothing here says the building is the lesser room. Nothing here suggests anybody has been doing it wrong for years, or that a house is more spiritual than a hall, or any of the other things that get said in this territory that leave a reader owning less than they arrived with.

You have not been getting this wrong, and there is no verdict here on where you have been going. Scripture says forsake not the assembling of ourselves together (Hebrews 10:25), and it is the Holy Spirit who has met you in every one of those rooms, and He was not withholding anything from a man standing at a counter with a plate.

The point is smaller. Your table is allowed to be one of the places too, and it has been sitting under an ironing board.

And there is no practice being handed over

I am not going to tell you what to do at that table.

Nothing here prescribes words before the food, a form, a reading, a candle, a chapter, a family arrangement, or a thing to say. Not one of those. Your table is yours and what happens on it is between you and the people at it and God, and anybody arriving in your kitchen with a required pattern has just given you a new thing to fail at on a Tuesday.

You are not being handed a program, and the whole of it is sitting down. The word says whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), and notice the verse starts with eating and does not attach a method to it, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary plate of food a place where something happens.