The Party on the Eighteenth

It is in the calendar as Team Social, Riverside Suite, 7pm and it has been in the calendar since the second week of November, and Hannah has looked at it more times than she has looked at anything else on that screen.

Thursday the eighteenth. Six weeks of knowing about it. The Riverside Suite is a function room in a hotel by the ring road with a long buffet down one side and a bar down the other, and she has been to it four times, and she can tell you the layout with her eyes closed, and specifically she can tell you where the bar is in relation to the door.

She cannot get out of it. That is the real content of the six weeks. Her manager has mentioned it twice in a friendly way. There is a Secret Santa. Somebody has made a spreadsheet. Not going has become a thing that would be noticed and asked about, and being asked about is the thing she is trying hardest in the world to avoid.

What she has been doing for six weeks, in the background, at odd hours, is running the evening. Where she stands. What she holds. What she says when Dev, who is kind and means nothing by it, says go on, one, it's Christmas. What her face does. Whether anybody has worked it out. Whether the way she leaves will tell them.

It is the seventeenth today.

You know that entry in the calendar. It might not be a work party. It might be a wedding, a christening, a birthday, a Sunday lunch. It has a date on it, and the date has been sitting in you for weeks, and the room is a room you know the layout of.

You are going into that room with a table already prepared for you in it, and you were never going to walk in unprovided for. The psalm says He prepares a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, which puts the provision inside the difficult room rather than after it; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a present arrangement for a Thursday evening in a function room by a ring road.

A table in the presence of

Let me name the weight first, because six weeks of it deserves naming properly.

It is not the drink. If it were only the drink you would have solved this by now. It is the room full of people who have a version of you, and the fear that the evening will amend it. It is Dev's kindness, which is harder to stand in than rudeness would be. It is the arithmetic of an exit: too early and somebody comments, too late and you are still there when the room changes character. You have been solving a logistics problem for six weeks that is actually a fear problem, which is why the solving never finishes.

So here is the verse, and I want you to notice where God puts the furniture.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

He does not clear the room. That is the first thing. He could have. The psalm could have said thou removest mine enemies and it would have been a perfectly good line. It says something better and much stranger: the table is set up in front of you, in the room, while the difficult thing is present and watching.

You are provided for inside that room, and you were never going to have to get out of it first. That is what stands written in Psalm 23, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a shepherd's table and sets it down in a hotel function room on the eighteenth of December.

Now the oil. Thou anointest my head with oil. A host in that culture put oil on a guest's head as a public act of welcome. It said, in front of everybody, this one is mine and this one is honored here. It was not a private comfort. It was a visible statement made in the room, for the room.

You are publicly claimed in a room where you feel most exposed, and you were never sneaking in unattached. Scripture puts the anointing in front of the watching, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real covering for a woman standing near a dessert table with a glass of soda in her hand.

And my cup runneth over. Overflowing is not a picture of just enough. It is a picture of more than the evening requires. Whatever you are afraid you will run out of in that room, poise, energy, the ability to be normal for two hours, the psalm describes a supply going over the edge of the cup, and it describes it at the table, in the presence, not afterward in the car.

You have more than that evening asks for, and you were never sent in with a measured ration. The written word says my cup runneth over, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the pouring in a room with a long buffet down one side of it.

And one plain thing, because this site says it in every article and means it: you do not owe anybody in that room an explanation. Not Dev, not your manager, not the person who asks twice. And if the friend who knows, the counselor, the doctor, or the room with the circle of chairs is what gets you through Thursday, use them, because that is God's kindness with a face on it and reaching for it is not a lesser faith. And you can leave. At any point. Leaving early is not a failure and it never was.