Booth Six and Thirty Years

Thursday, quarter past six, booth six, which is the second one along on the window side because the first one gets the door.

Thirty years.

They started when they both had small children and it was the only hour in a week either of them could find, and the children are grown and gone and neither man has ever suggested changing the arrangement or the day or the booth or the time.

He would tell you, without hesitating, that this is the closest friendship of his life. It is not a boast and it is not a low bar. He has thought about it. That man across the table knows more about him than anybody except his wife, and has been present for every significant thing that has happened to him since the eighties, and would drop anything.

And there is a thing that occurred to him last Thursday, driving away, and he has not been able to get rid of it since.

He cannot think of one occasion, in thirty years, on which he has told that man something that was hard to say.

He has told him a great deal. Jobs, the children, the year his mother was dying, the business, the thing with his back, his opinions about everything. The friend knows the facts of his life comprehensively and could sit down and write them out.

But the facts have all been reported after they were settled. That is the pattern, and he did not see it until last Thursday. He tells him about the year his mother was dying, and he told him during it, and what he told him during it was the schedule, the hospital, the arrangements with his sister. Accurate, current, and entirely from the outside.

Thirty years of a man sitting across from him, twice a month at least, and he has never once handed him anything to carry.

And here is the part that has really got him, because it is not about himself. He does not think that man has ever handed him anything either.

Two men, thirty years, one booth, and neither of them has ever put a thing on the table that the other had to do something with.

And you know that booth. You would rather be looked at than known, and you have a long, real, warm friendship that has never been asked to hold anything, and neither of you has ever noticed.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not shallow and thirty years of that friendship was not wasted. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and the searching there is complete and it is finished, and the Holy Spirit is in this booth with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

The verse names the occasion

There is a passage in Ecclesiastes about two being better than one, and everybody quotes the first half of it and almost nobody looks at the reason given.

Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.Ecclesiastes 4:9-10

Two are better than one, and then immediately: for if they fall.

That is the case being made. Not that company is pleasant, which it is. Not that conversation is good, which it is. The argument that the writer reaches for, first, as the strongest available, is what happens when one of them goes down.

Which means the verse is not describing a friendship like yours and mine on a good Thursday. It is describing a friendship at the one moment it is actually needed, and it treats that moment as the whole justification for the arrangement.

And then the second half, which is bleak and is meant to be. Woe to him that is alone when he falleth. The writer is not sentimental. He is telling you what it is like on the ground when there is nobody, and he is doing it to make the case for the pair.

You are in an arrangement whose whole purpose is the fall, and you have never used it for one. The written word makes falling the argument for the pair rather than an unfortunate possibility within it, which means the thirty years were building something for a use it has never been put to; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into booth six on a Thursday morning.

And notice the verb. The one will lift up his fellow. Lift is physical and it is undignified and it involves getting hold of somebody who is on the ground.

Nobody trained either of you

I want to be fair to both of you, because this is not a failure of character and there is a reason it went thirty years.

Nobody taught either of you how to do the other thing. You learned friendship the way men of your generation learned it, which is alongside: working on something, watching something, fixing something, eating something, and talking across it. That is a real form and it is not a lesser one, and there is nothing hollow about thirty years of it.

What that form does not have is a move for handing somebody something heavy. There is no established way to do it. It is not in the vocabulary. And so two men who would each unquestionably lift the other have gone three decades without either ever creating the occasion, not because they would refuse, but because neither of them has ever seen it done.

You were not withholding, and the form you both learned has no move for this in it. Proverbs 27:17 says iron sharpeneth iron; so a man sharpeneth the countenance of his friend, and sharpening involves contact and friction rather than pleasant proximity; His Spirit is the one who does that work between people, and He is not counting your thirty years.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful, because this is the last thing this site says and it would be very easy to tell you what to disclose.

I am not going to. Nothing on this page will tell you what to say, or that it has to be the hardest thing, or that the man in booth six is the right person. You know that man and that friendship better than any writer at a distance could, and the choosing of what and of whom is yours entirely and stays yours.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and no page gets a vote in either. Ecclesiastes 4:12 says a threefold cord is not quickly broken, and it describes a structure rather than prescribing a candidate; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been in booth six for thirty years of Thursdays.

Somebody has to go first

Here is the practical thing, and there is no way around it.

Nothing changes in that booth unless one of you goes first, and neither of you has, and the reason is not cowardice, it is that going first is genuinely awkward and there is no established way to begin.

So here is a way to begin, and it is deliberately unimpressive. You do not need an opening line and you do not need to explain what you are doing. You just say the thing that is currently true, in the present tense, at some point after the food comes, without building up to it.

He will do something. He is a man of your generation in a diner and he may well say something clumsy, or change the subject, or make a joke, and none of that means it did not land. What matters is that a thing was put on the table.

And it will be, almost certainly, the most significant Thursday of the thirty years, and neither of you will say so, and that is fine.

You are able to go first, and going first is the only move that has never been made in that booth. Scripture says the one will lift up his fellow, and the lifting requires somebody to be down and visible; the Holy Spirit is the one who has kept two men at the same table every Thursday for three decades without either of them ever needing to be lifted in front of the other.

So booth six is not thirty wasted years. It is the second booth along on the window side, and two men who would each drop anything, and an arrangement built for a purpose it has never once been asked to serve.

And if this has gone heavier than a page can carry, do not wait for the right person to appear. Find one real person this week who can sit with you without needing to solve anything, and if it has gone somewhere darker than tired, call or text 988 in the United States, at any hour, and a person will answer.