The Flat Is Beautiful and I Eat Standing Up

Tabitha noticed it on a Tuesday, standing at the counter with a bowl, and what she noticed was not the bowl.

It was that the table behind her had four chairs at it and had been used three times in fourteen months, twice for wrapping presents.

The money problem was real and it is over. She had four years that were genuinely hard, with two moves in them and a stretch where she did the arithmetic on the way to work, and then in the spring before last a thing happened at work that was completely deserved and had been a long time coming, and the salary moved properly, and then the flat.

She would not go back. She wants that stated plainly and so do I. Nothing on this page is going to be clever about a woman who got out from under it.

And she eats standing up.

Not always. When people come she is a good host, and people do come, and it is not the case that she has no friends and it would be a lie to write it that way.

But on the ordinary evenings, which are most of them, she stands at the counter with a bowl and eats fast, and she has worked out why and has not said it to anybody: sitting down at that table on her own is a different kind of evening, and standing up she can pretend she is between things.

What got her was a Saturday in November. Her nephew, who is seven, was staying while his parents did something, and at about six he said, in the enormous voice of a seven year old: are we having it at the table? And she said we can if you like, and he said, already climbing onto a chair: we have to, it is a table.

We have to, it is a table.

Tabitha stood in her own beautiful kitchen with two bowls in her hands and had to stop, and she could not have explained it to anybody who has ever been in that flat.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the salary.

She thought: everything that four years of arithmetic was for has arrived, and the thing I actually cannot do is sit down at my own table on a Tuesday.

Say the word properly, before anything else

I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman standing at a counter with a bowl.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a salary that finally moved, not a flat with good light. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And let me be plain about something else before we go any further. Nothing in this article suggests the money was a lesser gift or that the four hard years were more spiritual. That would be an ugly thing to say to a woman who used to do arithmetic on the bus. The salary was a real answer to a real problem, and it worked, and I am glad, and so is God.

What I want to do is much narrower. I want to name the thing that did not arrive with it, and I would rather the word of God named it, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed at it.

You are being spoken to here rather than spoken about. The written word says it, and His Spirit is the one carrying it across.

He sets the solitary in a family

There are two lines in the sixty-eighth psalm that describe what God does, and the second one is stranger and more specific than almost anything else in the book.

Father of the fatherless and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation. God settles the solitary in a home; he leads out the prisoners to prosperity.Psalm 68:5-6

Read the middle sentence on its own. God settles the solitary in a home.

Not comforts the solitary. Not visits the solitary, and not tells the solitary that He is enough and they should stop wanting anything else, which is what somebody usually says at this point and which is not what the verse says.

He settles them in a home. The remedy He is described as applying to aloneness is a household, and He is the one who does the settling, and the whole clause is in the present tense.

That is worth sitting with for a moment, standing up at a counter. The ache you have is not a spiritual failure and it is not ingratitude for the flat. It is the exact ache this verse names, and God is not embarrassed by it, and He does not answer it with a lecture about contentment.

You are not an ungrateful woman. You are somebody whose four hard years ended and whose evenings did not change, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It names the solitary and then names what God does about them, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a psalm and pulling out a chair.

And here is what is true of you tonight, before one thing about the flat or the diary changes. You are met where the money could not reach. His word says He settles the solitary, present tense, ongoing, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a settled fact in a body rather than a verse in a psalm.

What did not arrive with the salary

Think about what got you with two bowls in your hands. It wasn't the company. Your nephew is seven and mostly talks about dinosaurs.

It was: we have to, it is a table. It was a small person who has never in his life considered that a table might be for something other than sitting at, saying so with total confidence in your own kitchen. You were starving to be given permission to use your own life, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as self-pity, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the standing up. It is not that you are lonely, exactly, and it would be too easy to write it that way. It is that four years of surviving taught you to eat between things, and nobody sends a letter to tell a body that the four years are over.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. God is in the business of households, not just of provision. Jesus spent an extraordinary amount of His three years at other people's tables, eating, unhurried, in the middle of the most urgent work anyone has ever had, and He was in that kitchen while the bowls were still in your hands.