The Plate Was Never Moved

There is a plate that goes down in the same place at that table every Sunday and Marco eats standing up at the counter.

Nobody set that plate for him specially. That is what makes it so difficult to talk about. It is one of eleven, laid the way that table has been laid for thirty years, in the same order, because his mother lays a table the way other people breathe.

His place is the third one down on the left. It was his place when he was nine.

For about two years now he has taken his food and eaten it standing up at the counter by the stove, plate in his left hand, fork in his right, close enough to be part of the conversation and not actually at the table.

He has reasons. There is always a reason. Somebody has to keep an eye on the second lot of tortillas. There are too many people this week. His nephew wanted his chair, which was true once and not the other eighty times.

And nobody has ever mentioned it. Not once, in two years, has anybody in that family said, Marco, sit down.

He has thought about why, and he thinks he knows. Mentioning it would mean naming the reason, and the reason is a thing that happened, and this family does not do that at the table. So they let him stand, and they talk to him while he stands, and his mother puts the plate down at the third place every single week regardless, and nobody moves it, and nobody eats off it.

That plate has been sitting there empty on Sundays for about a hundred weeks.

And there is a thing about it that Marco has started to notice and cannot unnotice. His mother does not look at it. She lays it, and then she does not look at that part of the table for the rest of the meal, and she is a woman who looks at everything.

He does not know what that means. He has two readings of it and they point in opposite directions, and he has never asked, because asking would require saying out loud that he has been counting weeks.

And this is where I stop writing about Marco, because you are eating somewhere other than your place.

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

A place and a name, inside the walls

I want to give you a verse spoken over people who had every reason to believe they were permanently second class in the house of God.

Even unto them will I give in mine house and within my walls a place and a name better than of sons and of daughters.Isaiah 56:5

Two nouns, and it matters that there are two.

A place. That is where you are, physically, in the room. Not near the room. Not in the doorway of it. Within my walls, which is a phrase about the inside of a building, and Isaiah 56 chose that phrase rather than a warmer one on purpose, and the Holy Spirit had it kept for people standing in doorways.

And a name. That is what you are called while you are in there, which is a different thing entirely from being permitted to be present. Isaiah 56 gives both, in one line, and the Holy Spirit does not hand out one of them and leave the other for later.

Plenty of people have one without the other. A person can be inside a house and unnamed in it, which is exactly what standing at a counter is: present, included in the conversation, not seated, not counted in the eleven.

So take that at your mother's counter on a Sunday. You are given a place and a name within the walls, and Isaiah 56:5 says both, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a man able to sit down in the one that has been laid for him.

Now look at who Isaiah is talking to in that passage, because it is the whole reason this verse is here.

He is speaking to people who had been excluded by a rule, for reasons that were real, about things that had genuinely happened. The passage is not addressed to people who were wrongly kept out. It is addressed to people who had every reason to expect to stay outside, and the answer is not a review of their case. It is a place and a name, given, inside the walls.

The written word does not put a period of standing at counters in front of that, and the Spirit of God has not been running one.