The One Who Sets The Plates

Aaron got to his parents' house on Beech Street at ten to six, the way he had for most of his adult life, and did what he always did, which was start counting.

Nine tonight. Ten if his sister's boyfriend came, which he did about half the time and never said in advance. Aaron counted the chairs, went down to the basement for the folding one, and squeezed it in at the corner where the table leg makes it awkward, because that is where Junie always ends up and Junie is seven and does not mind.

Then the plates. Nine of the good ones, the cream colored set with the thin gold rim, two of them chipped on the underside where nobody sees. He set them down one at a time, going around, and put the chipped ones at his own place and at the corner, because Junie thinks the chips are a secret they share.

By six fifteen everybody was in. His brother Nate was already talking, hands going, telling the one about the contract that almost fell apart on Wednesday and how he saved it in a parking lot with a phone at four percent battery. It was a good story. Nate tells good stories, and this one had a real ending, and everyone laughed at the right place.

His sister Marisol went next. Second year of her residency. She had a patient this week who came in one way and left another, and she told it carefully, the way she tells everything, and their mother put a hand over her mouth in the middle of it.

Aaron got up and refilled the water pitcher.

He does this most weeks and he is not bitter about it. That is the part people get wrong. He is not sitting there seething. He works inventory at a plumbing supply on Route 9, counts fittings, reconciles the count, goes home. He is thirty eight. There is no contract that almost fell apart. There is no patient. When it comes around the table to him, he says work is fine, and somebody asks about the truck, and then it moves on, and honestly the moving on is a relief.

What he thinks, when he thinks about it at all, is that every family has one. The one who sets out the plates. The one who is there so that the ones with something to say have somebody to say it to. Filler. He would not use a mean word for it out loud, but that is the word underneath.

He came back with the pitcher and sat down and Junie moved her elbow so he could get in.

She has sat next to him for three years. Not once by accident. There have been Fridays when there was an open seat next to Nate, who is funny, and next to Marisol, who lets her wear her stethoscope, and Junie has walked past both of those seats and gone to the corner where the table leg makes it awkward and climbed up beside the man with the chipped plate.

Nobody at that table has ever noticed her doing it.

Junie has not noticed either. She is seven. If you asked her, she would say the corner is her seat, and that would be the whole answer, and she would go back to her food.

What God said to a man who called himself the least

There is a scene in Judges where an angel finds a man threshing wheat in a winepress, hiding his grain from raiders, and greets him as a mighty man of valor. And the man argues. Not out of false modesty either. He lays out the arithmetic, and the arithmetic is accurate.

And he said unto him, Oh my Lord, wherewith shall I save Israel? behold, my family is poor in Manasseh, and I am the least in my father's house.Judges 6:15

Read what God does with that, because it is not what a modern room would do. Nobody says nonsense, you are special. Nobody says you have hidden greatness. The answer comes back in Judges 6:14 and it is six words long in the sense that matters: go in this thy might.

This. The might he already had. The one that came with being the least in a poor family in a small tribe. God did not upgrade the material before He used it, and He did not tell Gideon his self assessment was wrong. He told him it was irrelevant.

You are the light of the world, and Jesus said that over a crowd who set out plates for a living. I am not warming you up with a compliment. Matthew 5:14 is written down as a statement of fact, spoken over fishermen and day laborers before a single one of them had a story worth telling at a table, and the Holy Spirit does not argue anybody into that. He seats it, in the one at the corner with the chipped plate.

Now notice what did not happen next. Gideon did not become interesting first. He stayed the least in his father's house for the whole rest of the account. The smallness was never fixed, because the smallness was never the problem.

You have nothing missing, and the story you do not have was never the entry requirement. Scripture is direct about the sort of person God reaches for: God has chosen the weak things of the world and the things which are not, 1 Corinthians 1:27, written down and never quietly withdrawn. And the Spirit is not waiting for you to become someone else before He agrees with it.

The plates were never a lesser thing

Here is where the ordinary life gets misread, and it gets misread by the person living it more often than by anybody else.

An evening at a table is not made of the stories told at it. It is made of the fact that there was a table, and the plates were on it, and there were enough chairs, and the water pitcher was full when somebody reached for it. Take the stories out and you still have a family eating dinner. Take out the one who set it up and there is no evening.

That is not a compliment about Aaron. He is not secretly the most important person in that room, and telling him he is would be its own kind of lie, one more thing for him to fail to live up to. The point is smaller and much better: the evening was always made of ordinary material, and he is ordinary material, and so it was never a step down.

You were already what that sentence was spoken over, with a stack of plates in your hands and nothing to report. Ephesians 5:8 puts it in the past tense on purpose, you are light in the Lord, and the same Spirit who moved on a hillside is moving in a dining room on Beech Street at six fifteen on a Friday.

And notice who noticed. Not the adults. The adults were listening to Nate, who deserved to be listened to. It was the seven year old, who chose a corner seat three years running, and who could not tell you why, and who does not know she is choosing.

Children are terrible at rating people and excellent at locating warmth. They do not know what a contract is. They know which chair feels like the safe one.

You are already the safe chair for somebody, and you have not been informed. John 1:9 was written about a light that lights every man coming into the world, and Romans 8:11 says the same Spirit who raised Jesus is living in you, so whatever a seven year old is walking toward on a Friday evening was never coming out of a plumbing supply on Route 9.