I Never Took The Leaf Out

She eats in the front room, in a chair, off a tray, and she has done for six years, and the dining room door stays shut.

The table in there seats nine with the leaf in. It has had the leaf in since a Christmas she could tell you the date of.

Two of them are dead. One is in another country and rings on Sundays. Two do not come, for reasons that are old and complicated and not anybody's fault in any way she can point to. One is nineteen and busy and lovely and comes at Easter.

So the table seats nine and there is one of her.

She has thought about taking the leaf out perhaps forty times. She goes in, and she stands there with her hand on it, and she cannot do it, because taking it out is a sentence. It says: this is the size we are now.

And she cannot leave it in either, because a table set for nine with nobody at it is not furniture, it is a statement, and she has to walk past that door about eleven times a day.

So the door stays shut and she eats off a tray in the front room and the whole thing waits.

She is not falling apart. She is seventy eight and she is capable and she does the church flowers and she is not somebody anybody worries about.

She just has a room in her house she does not go in.

You know that door.

Maybe it is a table. Maybe it is a bedroom, or a chair somebody sat in, or the good plates. Maybe your house has emptied slowly, over about a decade, with no single moment to point at, which is the hardest kind to grieve because nothing ever happened.

There is no failure here and there is nothing you should have done differently. Families thin. It happens by moving and dying and a hundred small drifts, and the person left in the house with the big table did not cause any of it.

And if what is under this is heavier than a page can carry, if the loss is fresh or the days have gone very dark, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a bereavement line, a friend who will come. That is not going around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.

A place kept, continually

Here is a scene where a king goes looking for somebody, and the sentence he ends on is about a table.

And David said unto him, Fear not: for I will surely shew thee kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore thee all the land of Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually.2 Samuel 9:7

Thou shalt eat bread at my table continually.

The man he is talking to had lost everything. His family was gone, his house was gone, he was living somewhere obscure, and he was lame in both feet and had been since he was five years old.

And what he is given is not a house of his own or a fresh start or a plan for recovery. He is given a place at a table that somebody else keeps.

Continually. Which is a word about permanence and not about frequency.

You have a place kept at a table continually, and it does not depend on you filling one of your own. That is what David says to a man with nothing left, thou shalt eat bread at my table continually (2 Samuel 9:7), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a present arrangement rather than an old story, because He is the one described as the earnest of an inheritance, a deposit put down on something already settled.

And notice that nobody in that scene asks the man to be finished grieving first.

Nothing here is telling you to do anything with that room

Let me be plain, because everybody in your life has an opinion about that dining room and I am not going to add to the pile.

Nothing here tells you to take the leaf out. Nothing here tells you to leave it in, or to open the door, or to have people round, or to downsize, or to make the room into something else, or to keep it exactly as it is.

Those are yours. All of them. And a person who arrives at a seventy eight year old's house with a plan for her dining room has understood nothing about what is in it.

You are not being handed a decision, and no part of this is a verdict on a shut door. The word says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that to a real woman with a real tray, and He has not been standing outside that room for six years waiting for her to sort it out.

The thing that has actually been happening

Here is what is worth saying, and it is not about the furniture.

You have not been avoiding a table. You have been protecting something. That room holds nine people, all at once, at their best, in the light of a particular Christmas, and you are the only person left who can see them.

Going in costs you all of them at the same time.

You have been carrying nine people in one room, and that is real work rather than a weakness. Scripture says thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book? (Psalm 56:8), and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a companionship in a hallway rather than a sentiment, and He has walked past that door eleven times a day with you.