Four Minutes to Eat

The tray comes down onto the low table and the whole room arranges itself around it.

Bread torn into a basket. White cheese. Olives glossy in oil, tomatoes with salt on them, a bowl of yogurt with mint stirred through, and the good tea going into the small glasses one at a time because the pot is slow and nobody minds. This is Friday afternoon at Karim's sister's house, and a Friday afternoon at Karim's sister's house is a two-hour proposition. Children come and go under the table. Somebody's uncle tells the story about the truck again, badly, and gets away with it. The tea will go round three times.

Karim sits down last, on the low stool by the wall, with his plate on his knees.

He does not bolt his food. Nobody watching him would say he bolts it. He eats steadily, without pausing between one thing and the next, the way a man works through a job that has a finish to it, and when you look up again his plate is clean and his glass is empty and he is already standing, plate in one hand, reaching for a couple of the empties with the other.

Four minutes. His sister has timed it, not unkindly, once, when the clock on the wall happened to be in her eyeline. Four minutes flat, and the second glass of tea has not even been poured.

So he takes the plates through, and rinses them, and comes back and stands in the doorway with a cloth over his shoulder while the room settles into the long middle of the afternoon. His nephew asks him something and he answers from the doorway. Someone tells him to sit, sit, and he says in a minute, and he means it, and the minute goes the way that minute always goes.

There was a stretch of years in his life when a meal was not a thing you settled into. It does not matter here what those years were. They ended a long time ago, ten winters back at least, and nothing in this house has ever once been taken off anybody. The door in this house opens onto a courtyard with a lemon tree in it and the only thing that comes through it is more family. And still, at the table, his hands know a piece of timing that his life stopped needing a decade ago, and they keep it perfectly, every single meal.

You know the four minutes. Maybe yours is not a meal. Maybe it is the way you pack a bag, or the way you keep your keys in your hand, or the fact that you never sit with your back to a door, or that you are up and moving before anyone else has decided the evening has started. Your body kept a piece of timing. It keeps it faithfully. And somewhere in you a quiet accusation has been forming for years, which is that a body that eats like that must not really have got out.

The cloth goes down before the room is safe

Everyone knows the psalm. The green pastures, the still waters, the valley. It gets read so gently, and it was written by a man who spent years sleeping rough with people hunting him, so let me put the weight back into the line that most people slide over.

You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies; you anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.Psalm 23:5

In the presence of. Not after. Not once the coast is clear and the door has been locked and everybody dangerous has moved to another province. The Host in that verse sets a full table in a room that still has a threat standing in the corner of it, and then, having set it, He does the two things that no host in a hurry ever does. He pours oil on the head of His guest, which takes time and a steady hand. And He fills the cup past the brim, which is the gesture of a man saying stay, there is more where that came from, sit down.

Read that against your four minutes and see what happens. The speed in your hands has been arguing, quietly, for years, that the meal is not safe until the room is. God's word puts the cloth down first. You are eating at a table that was laid in the room you are actually in, threat and all, and I am not offering you a comforting thought here: Psalm 23 is a written line about how this Host behaves, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it into a Friday afternoon with the tea going round.

And notice who is doing the work in the verse. Every active verb belongs to Him. He prepares, He anoints, He fills. The guest is not asked to relax, or to slow down, or to demonstrate anything at all. There is no line in the psalm where the guest has to prove he trusts the Host by taking longer over his food. You have a Host who set the table, and the setting of it did not wait on your pulse rate; that is written into every verb of Psalm 23, and His Spirit is not standing behind those verbs with a different opinion.

He knows the frame He is feeding

Now the second thing, and this is the one that has to be said plainly, because a lot of good people have been made to feel faithless by their own nervous system.

Your body remembering something is not unbelief. It is not a lack of faith and it is not a report on your standing with God. Scripture says God knows our frame, that He remembers we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and that word frame means the whole made thing: bones, nerves, the way flesh learns. He is the one who built a body that learns fast and keeps what it learns, and He was not surprised by yours. He is not sitting across the low table waiting for you to be a better guest. You were made by Someone who knows exactly what He is feeding, and it is written in Psalm 103 that He remembers we are dust, and the Spirit who inspired that line is the one keeping it true in you at the table.

I am not going to promise you that the four minutes becomes forty. I have no authority to promise that and I would not do it to you. What I can hand you is what is settled: the table is prepared, the cup is full, the oil is poured, and none of that is contingent on the speed of your hands. Whatever your body does at the next meal, this is yours already, because Psalm 23 hands the guest a full cup and not a stopwatch, and the same Spirit who wrote it is the one making a written line into ground under a low stool.

And one plain thing, folded in here, because I would rather say it and turn out not to be needed. If what your body carries has got heavier lately, if the nights have gone somewhere dark, tell one human being today, and reach the crisis line where you live if there is any danger in it. Say it to a doctor if a doctor is who you have. There is nothing in this page that stands between you and the care God has put into human hands, and walking toward help is one of the ordinary things a free man does.