The Far End of the Table

There are twelve chairs at that table and Fadi has taken the twelfth one every single time for two years.

It is not a punishment seat. Nobody assigned it. It is simply the one furthest from where Uncle Karim sits, and it is by the wall, and there is a door behind it, and if you are quick you can get up from it without anybody having to move.

He arrives early to make sure he gets it. That is the part he would not say out loud. He has, twice, moved a coat that somebody had left on it.

And here is what has been happening at the other end of that table for two years, which he has watched every week and never once mentioned.

The chair next to Karim stays empty.

Not deliberately. Nobody is holding it. It is just that the family knows where Fadi used to sit, and people do not take a seat that somebody used to have, and so there is a gap at the good end of the table every week, and everybody sees it, and nobody has ever said a word about it.

So the whole family is arranged, every week, around a fact none of them will name.

He is not being excluded. He wants to be clear about that with himself, because it would be easier if he were. Karim asks after him first, every time. Karim has said the words, more than once, plainly, in a way that left nothing hanging.

And Fadi hears them, and thanks him, and then takes the twelfth chair.

There is one more layer to it and it is the one that keeps him awake. He has begun to suspect that his uncle understands exactly what is happening, and has decided not to say anything about it, because pointing it out would make it a thing that has to be discussed in front of everybody, and Karim is not a man who does that to people.

Which means the kindest man at that table is being made complicit, every week, in an arrangement he did not choose and cannot mention. Fadi has thought about that on the drive home more than once and has never been able to put it anywhere.

And this is where I stop writing about Fadi, because you have a chair you take now.

I am not going to ask what happened. That is yours and it stays yours.

A table prepared, and where

I want to give you a line everybody knows and to put the emphasis on the word that gets skipped.

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

Preparest.

It is not a table that happened to be there. Somebody laid it. Somebody decided where it went and what was on it and who was sitting at it, and the whole scene is described as an act of hospitality performed deliberately by God.

And then: in the presence of mine enemies. Not in a private room. Not once the situation is resolved and everybody has gone home. In the open, in front of the people who would rather this were not happening, and with nothing about the situation cleared up first.

So take that at the twelfth chair. You are seated at a table somebody prepared on purpose, and Psalm 23:5 says thou preparest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to actually sit down at it.

Then the two details at the end, and they are not decoration.

Oil on the head is what a host did for an honored guest at the door. It is a public act. It happens in front of everybody, and it says, before a word is spoken, what this person is to me.

And my cup runneth over is a serving decision. Nobody pours a cup past the brim by accident. It is the host's hand, in front of the room, deliberately giving more than the situation requires, and the written word puts that at a table set in the presence of people watching, and the Spirit of God has never once served a person quietly to spare a room the awkwardness.