The Last Piece on the Plate

The plate goes round one more time and comes to rest in the middle of the table with one piece of cornbread on it.

Sunday supper at Hollis's own table. His daughter and her husband down one side, the two boys down the other with their elbows where elbows should not be, his wife at the far end with the tea. There has been plenty. There is always plenty. Nobody at this table has gone hungry in twenty years and the corner of the pan is still sitting on the stove under a towel.

His daughter picks up the plate and holds it out to him.

Dad. Take it.

I'm fine, he says. Go on.

And she rolls her eyes at him fondly and sets it down, and the boys start on about the truck, and the plate sits there in the middle of the table for the rest of the meal like a small stone in a stream that everybody's talk runs around.

Here is the thing about Hollis, and he has never told anybody, because until about a year ago he did not know it himself. He has never taken the last of anything in his life. Not the last piece of anything on a plate. Not the last cup in the pot, which he will leave and then make a fresh one at nine at night. Not the last seat in the cab, not the last of the ice, not the last good tomato in the bowl. When he serves himself he counts the heads at the table first and then works out what is left over, and what he takes is the leftover of the leftover, and he does it fast, the way you do arithmetic you have done ten thousand times.

And it looks like generosity. Some of it is. He is a generous man and everybody who knows him would say so first.

But you cannot call it generosity at the end of a Sunday supper at his own table, when every person there has had all they want, when his wife made extra on purpose, when his own daughter is holding the plate out to him and saying take it, when the piece is going in the trash on Tuesday. That is not a man giving something away. That is a man obeying something.

He could not tell you who set it. That is what has started to get to him. He can tell you every other rule he lives by and who put it there and why he agrees with it. This one has no name on it. It arrived before he was keeping records, and it does not argue, and it does not need to, because it has never once been asked to produce anything.

And you knew all of that four paragraphs ago, because there is a plate on your table too. Maybe it is not food. Maybe it is the good chair, or the new coat, or the day off, or the second helping of anything at all. Maybe it is smaller and stranger than any of those. I am not going to guess what your rule is and I am certainly not going to tell you where it came from, because I have not been at your table and any man who claims to know is making it up.

But I have come and pulled out a chair, and I want to ask you one question about it that nobody has asked you: who signed it?

A rule with nobody's name on it

Let me be careful here, because there is a cheap version of this message and I do not want to hand it to you.

The cheap version says all rules are made up and a free man does what he wants. That is not the gospel and it is not what I am here for. Plenty of your rules are good and God wrote several of them Himself, and the discipline in you that gets up early and finishes what it starts is worth more than most of what the world sells as freedom. I am not coming after your character. I am coming after one unsigned card taped inside a cupboard door.

And I am not going to lecture you about looking after yourself, either. That counsel has been offered to you before, it slid off, and it slid off because it was aimed at the wrong thing. This was never a failure of self care. It is a legal question, and it has a legal answer.

Set your weight on the sentence and not on me.

For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving:1 Timothy 4:4

Paul is writing to a young pastor about people who had begun forbidding things God never forbade, and he does not argue with them item by item. He goes to the deed. Every created thing is good, because of who made it, and the only question left about any of it is how it is taken. It is written there in the fourth chapter, and the Spirit who moved Paul to write it is standing at your supper table: you have permission that predates the rule, and the permission is not a concession made to you, it is a fact about the food.

Notice which way the burden runs in that verse, because it runs the opposite way from how you have been living. Paul does not say you may have it once you have earned it, or once everybody else is satisfied, or once you can prove nobody minds. He says it is good, and he says the thing that makes it yours is thanksgiving. Then in the very next line he adds that it is set apart by the word of God and by prayer, and the Holy Spirit is the one applying an old letter to a plate of cornbread: it is already settled that a thing God made and you thanked Him for is clean in your hands, and the settling did not consult the rule.

The table is your Father's, and nobody at it is a guest

Now let me put you somewhere in Scripture, because a man understands his standing best when he can see the room.

You know the story of the son who came home. Everybody knows it. But there is a line at the end of it that most people forget, and it is not spoken to the one who ran off. It is spoken to the older brother, who had stayed, and worked, and never once asked for so much as a young goat to have his friends over. The father comes out to him in the yard, and does not scold him, and says: son, you are always with me, and everything I have is yours (Luke 15:31).

That is not a man being told off for wanting. That is a man being told what he already owned while he was standing out in the field working on the assumption that he owed. The same Spirit who kept that sentence for us is the one saying it over a supper table now.

His word made the rule about receiving and it never once made it about deserving, and His Spirit is not running a stricter house than the one Scripture actually describes. Psalm 145 says He opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing, and it does not add a footnote for the ones who did not want to be any trouble. This is yours, at that table, on that Sunday: the last piece was never somebody else's by default, and you were never the leftover of the leftover.

And if the going without has stopped being about a plate, if it has begun to sit on you in a way you would not say out loud to anybody, then tell one human being today, plainly, and if there is any danger in it reach the crisis line where you live and stay on with a real voice. There is no shame in that door and free men walk through it.