A Delight at a Table of Duty

The table has been pulled out to its full length again and there are two mismatched chairs at the far end, and somebody has already asked, before the plates are down, roughly how long this is going to take.

Not unkindly. That is the thing. Nobody in this house is unkind. It is a good family and they have kept this evening for as long as anybody can remember, and they will keep it next week and the week after, and the keeping is not in question. It is just that most of the people at this table are getting through it. You can see it in the shoulders. You can see it in the way three of them check the clock over the door without moving their heads, which is a skill you can only get by practicing it for years.

The uncle at the end tells the same joke he tells. One of the teenagers has a phone face down beside a fork and is not touching it, which is its own kind of effort. The grandmother says the words the way she has said them since 1974, quickly, correctly, with her mind already on whether there is enough of the second dish.

And there is a man about halfway down the long side who is having the best hour of his week.

He would not say that out loud. He has never said it out loud. But the light on that cloth, the noise, the passing of things from hand to hand, the particular sound of eleven people in one room all talking slightly too loudly, the fact that for one evening nobody is anywhere else: it lands on him every single time. He looks around when he thinks nobody is looking. He would keep this table if the rest of his life fell in.

And here is his actual problem, which is not the problem you would expect. He is lonely in the middle of his favorite hour. Because he cannot say it. If he says it, it becomes a comment on everybody else. If he says it, the grandmother hears a criticism of 1974 and the teenager hears a lecture, and the evening that he loves turns into a discussion about the evening, which is exactly the thing that would kill it.

You know that seat.

You are the glad one in a room of people who are getting through it. Maybe it is a table, maybe it is a Sunday, maybe it is the kitchen at your mother's house. And you have worked out, without anybody explaining it to you, that gladness in a room of duty is a delicate thing to carry, because the moment it is announced it stops being gladness and becomes an opinion about the others.

So let me show you two things. The first is what God actually called this in the first place, which will surprise you. The second is where gladness is supposed to go when it cannot be said, because it does have somewhere to go, and it is not into your own chest and it is not into correcting anybody.

Delight was the word God chose

I want to be plain about what I am not doing here. I am not going to tell your family how to keep anything, I am not going to tell you which evening or how long, and nothing in this is an argument about anybody's practice. That is not the subject and it is not my business.

The subject is one word, and God chose it.

If thou turn away thy foot from the sabbath, from doing thy pleasure on my holy day; and call the sabbath a delight, the holy of the LORD, honourable.Isaiah 58:13

Call it a delight. That is not a suggestion about attitude bolted onto a rule about behavior. It is the name. The Hebrew word there is oneg, which is not mild. It is not contentment and it is not approval. It is the word you would use for something exquisite, the sort of pleasure a person would cross a city for. God, describing a keeping He set up Himself, tells His people what to call it, and what He tells them to call it is a delight.

So read your own seat again in that light. Hear where this comes from and not from me: Isaiah 58 puts the word delight in God's own mouth about His own day, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a room with eleven people in it. You are not the eccentric at that table; you are the one for whom the thing is doing what it was named to do.

That is worth sitting with, because a glad man in a dutiful room usually assumes he is the anomaly. He is not. He has simply come into possession of the original word. The others are keeping it faithfully, and faithful keeping is a real and honorable thing that God never once despised, and I am not going to have a single one of them spoken against at their own table. But the word over the evening is delight, and it was delight before he got there.

You have the name of the evening in your hands and not an opinion about it, and it is written in Isaiah 58 that God called it that, and His Spirit is the one who put the gladness in a man rather than a preference.

Where gladness goes when it cannot be spoken

Now the practical half, and Nehemiah has it exactly.

The exiles are back. The book is read out loud in the square for the first time in generations, and the people start weeping, because they understand it and it is a great deal to take in at once. And the leaders say something remarkable to a crowd of crying people.

Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

Watch what the gladness is told to do. It is not told to explain itself. Nobody in that square is told to go and adjust anybody's face. The joy is given one direction and one only: send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared. It goes outward, in dishes, to people who did not have any.

And then the chapter says what happened, and it is one of the loveliest sentences in the Old Testament: the people went their way to eat, and to drink, and to send portions, and to make great mirth. The mirth came second. It came after the portions went out.

That is God's own account of what glad people do among people who are not there yet, recorded in Nehemiah 8, and the same Spirit who filled that square is the one at your table. You were given a gladness that has an errand, and the errand is a plate and not a paragraph.

So this is the whole craft of being free among them. You do not announce. You do not correct. You do not become the family's designated enthusiast, which is a role that would exhaust you and irritate them in about four weeks. You pour. You pass. You carry the heavy dish from the kitchen so the grandmother does not. You ask the teenager with the face-down phone one real question about the thing he actually cares about, and then you listen to the whole answer. Your gladness leaves you as portions, and nobody at that table ever has to know what you are doing, including you, most of the time.

It is already yours, this hour, and it does not require one other person at that table to agree with you about it. His word set the name of the day before anybody's mood was consulted, and His Spirit is not waiting for the room to catch up before He lets you enjoy it.

One plain thing folded in here, because I would rather say it than leave it out. Being the only glad one in a room can be its own kind of alone, and if that has been going somewhere darker than loneliness lately, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Saying it to a person is one of the ordinary things a free man does.