She Set the Plate Again

Every Sunday for eleven years Abuela Marisol set a plate in the same place, and for a good number of those Sundays nobody sat in front of it.

It was not a shrine and she would have been offended if you said so. She did not talk about it. She did not point at it. It got set with the others, at the same time, in the same order, and when the meal was over it got cleared with the others, washed, and put back in the same cupboard until the following week.

And there were Sundays when the chair was full. That is the part people forget when they tell this kind of story. He came back. Repeatedly. That was never the difficulty.

The difficulty is what happened inside him on the fourth time, and the seventh, and the ninth.

Because the first time he came back it went through him like heat. She did not say a word about where he had been. She put food in front of him and asked him about his knee, which he had hurt years earlier, and which she still remembered, and he had to leave the table for a minute.

The fourth time, it landed less.

By the ninth time, he could observe the welcome happening. He could see it clearly, describe it accurately, tell you exactly what it meant. And it did not reach him. He sat at a table where he was completely and unreservedly received, and he felt like a man watching a film about somebody being received.

That is the thing this message is about, and almost nobody names it.

It is not that the welcome ran out. Hers never did. It is that his ability to receive it wore down, and a person who cannot receive a welcome ends up assuming that the welcome must have thinned, because from the inside those two feel exactly the same.

And once that assumption is in place it does a second thing, which is worse. It makes the person start protecting the welcomer. He began arriving later. He began leaving earlier. He began, on two occasions, not coming at all, and telling himself it was a kindness, that he was sparing her one more Sunday of doing this. She had asked for no such sparing. Nobody in that house had ever suggested she was tired.

But a man who cannot feel a thing being given will eventually decide it is costing more than it is worth, and he will decide that on the giver's behalf, and he will never once check.

And this is where I stop writing about him, because you have been welcomed more than once.

I am not going to ask how many times and I am not going to ask what for. It is yours and it stays yours.

Look at what the father does not say

I want to take you to the most famous welcome in the world and show you a detail that is hiding in plain sight, because everybody watches the son and almost nobody watches the timing.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

A great way off.

That is the detail. The father did not wait to hear the speech. The son had prepared one, a good one, carefully worded, and the father moved before a single syllable of it was audible, because the distance was still too great for speech to carry.

Which means nothing the son said had any part in what happened next. The running was already happening while the words were still unsaid.

And now watch what the father does not do. He does not ask where he has been. He does not establish terms. He does not say we will see how it goes this time. Not one word of assessment appears anywhere in that scene, and Luke put in the running and left out the interview on purpose.

So take that at your own table, on whatever number this is. You are met before the speech, and Luke 15:20 has the father running while the son is still a great way off, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that reach a person who has stopped being able to feel it.

And here is the piece for a man who can no longer feel the welcome landing.

The father's running is not measured by the son's reaction. Nothing in that verse depends on how it felt to be embraced. The written word describes what the father did, not what the son received, and the Spirit of God is not put off by a person whose feelings have gone numb from repetition.