The Wine on the Friday Table

The cloth goes on at about five and the bread comes out from under its cover at about seven, and the cup goes round somewhere between the two, and Menachem has been sitting at that table since he was a boy and at the head of it for eleven years.

There are usually thirteen. His mother, his brother's family, two of the grandchildren's friends who have been coming so long that nobody counts them as guests, and the woman from four doors down whose husband died and who has come every Friday for six years.

It is the best hour of his week and he would not give up one minute of it.

He stopped four years ago. He did not make an announcement, because the table is not a place for announcements, and because his mother is eighty six and would ask him about it every Friday for the rest of her life out of love.

So the cup goes round, and it passes him, and everybody at that table has noticed by now and nobody has ever said a word, and he has never had to explain a single thing.

It is fine. He wants that on the record. It is entirely fine, four years in, and he is not white knuckling anything.

And there is a moment, about eleven seconds long, once a week, at the head of his own table, in the house he loves most in the world, where the whole room does one thing and he does not, and he has never got used to it and he has stopped expecting to.

You know that moment. It might be a cup, a toast, a round, a plate. It is at the center of a thing you love and would defend, and it will be there next week and the week after, and you would not change the evening for anything.

You have the word of God located in the fabric of an ordinary house, and you were never sent somewhere else to find it. Deuteronomy says thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates, and God put His word into the frame of a family home; the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live fact at a table on a Friday evening.

Upon the posts of thy house

Let me name it exactly, and let me be careful, because there is nothing wrong here and that is the whole difficulty.

Nobody at that table is doing anything he should not. The evening is good. Your family is good. You are four years in and steady, and you would not move the cup and you would not skip a Friday and you would not want a single person there to change one thing.

And there are eleven seconds, once a week, where you are the only one in a room doing something different, at the head of your own table, and it is not painful exactly, it is just that you are aware of yourself in a room where you are otherwise entirely at home.

And I am not going to tell you to say something to your family. You have weighed that with your mother at eighty six and you have made a decision that is not fear, and I am not overturning it from a page.

Here is where God chose to put His word.

And thou shalt write them upon the posts of thy house, and on thy gates.Deuteronomy 6:9

Read the whole passage and notice the locations. Talk of them when thou sittest in thine house. When thou walkest by the way. When thou liest down. When thou risest up. Bind them on thine hand, between thine eyes, on the doorframe, on the gate.

Every single one of those is domestic. There is not one temple in that list. God locates His own word in the ordinary architecture of a family house: the sitting down, the getting up, the walk to work, the doorframe you touch on your way through.

You have God's word installed in the ordinary places, and you were never asked to go somewhere special to be with it. That is what stands written in Deuteronomy 6, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live arrangement in a house with thirteen people in it on a Friday.

And the posts of thy house. The doorframe. Which is not a room and is not a destination; it is a threshold, the thing you pass through on the way to somewhere else. God put His word at the point of transit, the place a person touches on the way in and out, dozens of times a day, without ceremony.

You are meeting the word at the threshold rather than at a destination, and you were never required to arrive anywhere first. Scripture puts it on the doorframe, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a real place for a man to be met on his way into a room.

And thy house. His. Not the house of a righteous man in general, not a house that has been cleared or prepared. Yours, as it stands, with everybody in it and everything on the table. God's instruction assumes an occupied ordinary home with a family in it doing what families do.

You are being met in an occupied ordinary house, and you were never being asked to empty it first. The written word says thy house and assumes a full one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that fit thirteen people and a white cloth on a Friday.

And the plain thing, which this site says every time and means. Four years of eleven seconds a week that you have never described to anybody is a lot of unmentioned. Tell somebody outside that table. A friend, a counselor, your doctor, a room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and your family never has to know a thing about it.