The Chair Nobody Has Sat In

There are nine at that table on a Friday and there is always a tenth chair, because his wife will not have a table with nobody left over.

It is a generous house. I want that established because everything else in this depends on it.

There is too much food, every week, deliberately. Somebody always takes something home. The children of three families have grown up half raised in that kitchen and two of them still call his wife by a name that is not her name. If you turn up at nine at night in that street with a problem, that is the door.

The tenth chair is for whoever comes.

And in six years, the people who have come are: his brother, his brother's wife, four families they have known for a decade, a nephew, a colleague twice, and the wife's sister who lives eighty miles away and comes at Eid.

Every single one of them was going to be at somebody's table that night.

Four doors down there is a man who has eaten alone for two years. He knows this. Everybody on that street knows this in the vague way people know things, the way you know that a house needs painting. The wife died. There are children somewhere but not here. He puts his bin out on a Tuesday and he says good morning and he goes back inside.

Six years of a tenth chair, and a man four doors down eating alone every night of it.

The verse names the stranger

There is a line at the end of Hebrews that everybody has embroidered on something and nobody reads carefully.

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.Hebrews 13:2

Take that at your own table. You are hospitable already and one category has gone missing. The word says be not forgetful to entertain strangers, which is addressed to people who host, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept that man four doors away in plain sight.

Strangers.

Not guests. Not friends. Not the wide and generous circle of people who love you, which is a good thing and is not what this verse is about.

And look at the verb it opens with. Be not forgetful. It is not addressed to inhospitable people. It is addressed to people who host, who are good at hosting, who host constantly, and who have quietly forgotten a category.

That is you, and it is not an accusation, it is a diagnosis, and the two feel similar for about a minute and then they stop.

So take this at your own table, and know it is not my correction, it is what is written: you are already hospitable, and the chair is already there, and what is missing is one name. His word says be not forgetful to entertain strangers, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept a man four doors down in front of you for two years without you being able to look at him properly.

There was a man in England in the seventeen hundreds who was met by God at a meeting he had not wanted to attend, and what came of it was not a feeling. It was a timetable, and most of that timetable pointed at people nobody was inviting anywhere.

Prisons, for fifty years. Debtors' gaols, where men were held for owing money they could not earn while held. Pit villages. He sat with people the night before they were hanged, which is the purest possible form of an hour that cannot be repaid.

He organized ordinary people to visit, to feed, to teach, to sit with the sick on their own streets, and the whole engine of it pointed outward at the people not already inside somebody's circle.

The name that got attached to them started as mockery of how methodical they were. They kept it, because it was accurate.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is only a schedule. He held both, and the direction the warmth went was toward the ones with nothing to give back.