The Table You Packed and Never Unpacked

The table is a folding one, cheap, with a scorch mark near the left corner from a pan that came off the heat too fast in the second winter.

It used to live against the wall in the old kitchen, and it came out most weeks. Not for dinner parties. There was never anything to make a dinner party out of. It came out for the ones with nowhere else: the student two doors down who ate rice for eleven days, the man from the night shift who could not sleep before four, the woman who arrived in the country in October and had not eaten anything hot since.

There was one pot. Lentils, mostly, with cumin and too much lemon, and bread that got torn rather than cut, and the sugar bowl passed round more times than anybody needed.

And there was the extra plate. Always the extra plate, set before anybody knew who it was for.

Then came the move.

Different city, smaller flat, a stairwell where nobody knows the surname of the family below. The table went into a cardboard sleeve and the sleeve went behind the boxes in the spare room, and it has been three years.

Three years is long enough to build an explanation, and hers is a good one. She was never gifted. She was just good with people. It was the old house that did it, the big kitchen, that season of life. Real gifts are the ones with a microphone in front of them, the ones you can put on a rota. Hers was a habit, and habits are allowed to end.

Then one Sunday somebody new stands at the back of the hall holding a cup of tea with both hands, the way a person does when they have nobody to put the cup down beside.

And her hands, without asking her, start counting chairs.

You know that count. Maybe your table was never a table. Maybe it was a back doorstep, a kettle at work, a car with the passenger seat always clear. Whatever the shape of it, you know the thing your hands still do before your mind has finished explaining why it does not matter.

And you have been carrying an explanation for three years that is doing more work than it can honestly bear.

Scripture puts your table in the list

Here is the sentence that ends the argument, and it is not an inspirational sentence, it is an instruction with an inventory attached.

Use hospitality one to another without grudging. As every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, as good stewards of the manifold grace of God.1 Peter 4:9-10

Read the join between the two verses. Hospitality is not mentioned and then left behind while the passage moves on to the real gifts. Hospitality is the example the gift sentence is standing on. The welcome is named first, and the word gift arrives immediately afterwards to explain what the welcome was.

You are not describing a personality trait. You are describing something that was handed to you. 1 Peter 4:10 says as every man hath received the gift, even so minister the same one to another, and the word received rules out temperament, because nobody receives their own disposition, and the Holy Spirit is the one who did the handing.

The explanation about the big kitchen was never true, then. The kitchen was a room. The rooms change.

You have not been given a smaller thing than anybody else in your church. 1 Corinthians 12:11 says the same Spirit divides to every man severally as He will, and a Giver who chose deliberately does not rank His own choosing, so there is no ladder here with the microphone at the top and the sugar bowl at the bottom, and the Holy Spirit did not distribute consolation prizes.

That matters more than it sounds, because the ranking is what put the table in the box.

Not the move. The move only supplied a date. What actually happened is that somewhere along the way the welcome got reclassified as the thing a person does until a real gift turns up, and anything filed as a stopgap is very easy to leave in a cardboard sleeve.

The move did not cancel the calling

Three years is a long time to be quietly certain that a door has shut behind you.

So be exact about who shuts doors, because Scripture is exact about it.

You were never asked to earn any of it back. Paul told Timothy to stir up the gift of God which is in thee, 2 Timothy 1:6, and the verb is stir rather than acquire, rather than reapply, rather than prove, and the Holy Spirit does not ask a steward for a receipt on something He put there Himself.

You are not late for something that was never on a clock. Romans 11:29 says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, which means He has not revised His mind about you while the table sat behind the boxes, and the Holy Spirit does not withdraw an anointing because a kitchen changed its postcode.

And notice what Scripture thinks is actually happening when a stranger sits down.

You have been given work that the written word keeps beside the holiest things. Hebrews 13:2 says be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares, and that sentence sits in the same chapter as marriage, contentment and the altar, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than your diary who arranges which stranger ends up in your stairwell.

Nobody unaware ever knew in advance. That is the whole point of the word unawares. The student two doors down did not arrive with a label on. Neither will the next one.