Why Do You Set That One

Nine years she has laid it, and last Sunday a nine year old finally asked.

The girl was helping with the table, which she is old enough to do properly now, and she counted the chairs and then counted the plates and looked up and said, straight out with no edge in it at all: Grandma, why do you set that one?

And her grandmother, who has had nine years to prepare for this exact question, said something about it being handy in case somebody drops in, and the girl said all right and carried on with the forks.

It was handled. Nobody was upset. The dinner was fine.

But it has been sitting with her all week, because the answer she gave was not true, and she has never lied to that child about anything, and she is not going to start over a plate.

And here is what she has never said to anybody at that table: she does not entirely know why she sets it any more, and she has been setting it every Sunday for nine years without examining it once, and now a child has looked straight at it and she cannot look away.

Look at what you have actually been doing

Let me describe it before anything else, because a nine year old asked a good question and it deserves a real answer.

For nine years you have laid a plate for somebody who does not come. You have never told him you do it. You have never mentioned it in a message, never worked it into a conversation, never let it be seen from his end at all. Which means that in nine years it has never once functioned as pressure on him.

That is worth understanding. There is a way of keeping a place that is a demand, and everybody involved can feel it. This is not that. This is a woman laying a plate in a kitchen where the only witnesses are her family and God.

You have been keeping something open in a way that costs him nothing, and nine years of that has been generosity rather than sentiment. That is not somebody being kind about a plate. Hebrews 6:10 says God is not unjust to forget your work and the love you have shown, which covers nine years of an extra setting, and the Holy Spirit is the one raising it now to name it rather than to ask you to stop.

And the psalm says the thing about waiting that most people skip past.

Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord.Psalm 27:14

Read who the waiting is on. Not a person. Not an outcome. The Lord. And notice that the psalm has to say it twice, at the beginning of the verse and again at the end, because the human instinct is to attach the waiting to something visible and the psalm keeps pulling it back.

That is the correction available to you at that table, and it is a small one and it changes everything: the plate is set for whoever God sends, and it was never a summons issued to one man.

Hoping and monumentalizing are two different things

There is a way of keeping an empty place that turns it into a monument, and a monument is a thing that fixes a moment in time and asks everybody who passes it to feel something.

That is not what is on that table. Nobody in that family feels anything when they sit down. A child had to count the plates to notice it.

You are keeping a place rather than building a monument, and the difference is that nobody at that table is being asked to grieve on schedule. Scripture puts the posture in Lamentations 3:25, where the Lord is good to those who wait for Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a long practice from calcifying into a shrine.

Where your part ends

Say this plainly. Keeping a place open is never the same as owing anybody access, and nothing here asks anybody to keep a door open into harm. If there is a reason he should not be at that table, then the plate can be laid and the door can stay shut, and there is no contradiction in it. Get whoever is at risk safe, tell one real person who can actually do something, and hold this: safety comes before peace, always.

And this too. Nothing on this page says he is coming. Nobody knows that, and an article that told you otherwise would be lying to a woman who has waited nine years and deserves better.

Let us hold fast the profession of our faith without wavering; for he is faithful that promised.Hebrews 10:23

He is faithful that promised. The faithfulness in that verse belongs to God, and the thing being held fast is the profession rather than a prediction about a person. You are holding on to somebody who is faithful rather than to an outcome that is uncertain, and only one of those two has ever been the thing in your hands. Hebrews 10:23 puts the faithfulness in Him rather than in the situation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who supplies the holding, week after week, in a kitchen on a Sunday.