My Own Birthday, and the Cake

A hundred and ten people, which he knows because his sister-in-law did the numbers for the caterer and told him twice.

Fifty. The hall is the one they always use. There is bunting his nieces made. There is a slideshow that ran during the food and had four photographs in it that he would have vetoed. His mother is here at eighty-six and has stayed later than anybody expected.

And the cake comes out and the lights go down a little and a hundred and ten people start singing to him.

And he counts the room.

Not deliberately. He does not decide to. But somewhere between the first line and the second his eyes go round the tables the way they always do, and he is registering: his brother is here, the two from the shop are here, the man he fell out with in 2014 came, that whole table is his wife's side and they made an effort, the couple from church who never come to anything came.

He is checking. That is what it is. He is checking whether the room is right.

And it is right. That is what makes it strange. Everybody who should be here is here and several people who did not have to be are here, and the count comes out well by any measure, and he is standing behind a cake with fifty candles on it being sung to by a hundred and ten people who like him.

And something in him is not touched by any of it.

He has known that for a while. He has been at good things and been fine at them and driven home with this, and it has never once been about the quality of the event, because he has now tested it against the best possible event and it held.

And he cannot name it. Fifty years old and he does not have a word for the thing that a hundred and ten people did not reach.

And you know that room. There is a hunger in you that the room does not touch, and you have tested it against good rooms and it survived them, and you have never had a word for it and would not know who to try it on.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not ungrateful and there is nothing wrong with you for counting. Psalm 73:25 says whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none upon earth that I desire beside thee, and it is written by a man with a full life around him, and the Holy Spirit is in this hall with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

He came to himself

There is a phrase in the middle of the best-known story Jesus ever told, and it is doing something people rush past on their way to the father running down the road.

The young man is in a far country and it has gone badly and he is in a field with animals, and then the text says this.

And when he came to himself, he said, How many hired servants of my father's have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with hunger!Luke 15:17

He came to himself.

That is not a phrase about remorse. It is not a phrase about feeling bad. It is what you say about somebody who has been out of it and is suddenly present. Somebody coming round. Seeing the actual situation for the first time in a long while.

And what he sees, in that moment of coming round, is an accurate inventory: there is bread at my father's, there is more than they need, and I am starving.

That is all. It is not repentance in the emotional sense and it is not yet a decision. It is a man in a field seeing clearly what is true about where the food is and what state he is in.

And it is the hinge of the entire story. Everything after it, the getting up, the road, the father, the ring, all of it comes out of one moment of accurate seeing in a field.

You are having a moment of coming to yourself, and that is the hinge and not the problem. The written word makes the turning point a moment of accurate seeing rather than a wave of feeling, which means what happened to you behind a cake was the beginning of something rather than a failure of gratitude; and the Holy Spirit is the one who does that bringing round, in a hall, with a hundred and ten people singing.

And notice something about the hunger in his sentence. He does not say I am lonely, or I have made a mess. He says I perish with hunger, which is the plainest possible statement of a physical fact.

Counting is not ingratitude

I want to say something about the counting, because you have been quietly ashamed of it for years and it is not what you think.

You count rooms. You have done it at weddings and funerals and every gathering you have ever been at, and you have taken it as evidence of something small in you, a scorekeeping, a needing to be liked.

Look at what you are actually doing. You are checking whether the room is right. Which means somewhere in you there is a picture of what a right room would be, and you are testing this one against it.

That is not vanity. That is a man with a hunger he cannot name, using the only instrument he has, which is arithmetic, to try and find out whether the thing he is short of is here.

And tonight you got the highest score you will ever get, and it did not settle it, and that is not a bad result. That is information. It rules out an entire category of answers, permanently, and a man of fifty who now knows for certain that no room is going to do it has learned something very few people ever learn.

You were not scorekeeping, and the count was an instrument rather than a vanity. Psalm 34:10 says the young lions do lack, and suffer hunger: but they that seek the LORD shall not want any good thing, and lack there is stated plainly about the strong and the well-provided; His Spirit is the one carrying that promise, and He is not measuring your attitude at your own party.

And here is the second half, and I will keep it plain. I am not going to tell you what this hunger is about. I do not know what fifty years have been, and a stranger writing at a distance who starts explaining a man to himself is doing something presumptuous, and there is a great deal of that about.

What is true is that it is real, and that it does not have to be diagnosed before it can be met, and that the man in the field did not analyze himself either. He noticed where the bread was and got up.

You are not being asked to explain it, and no account is required first. Luke 15:20 says when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and every verb in that sentence belongs to the father; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who brought you round behind a cake at your own fiftieth.

Bread enough and to spare

Here is the part of his sentence that I want to leave you with.

He does not say: there is bread at my father's. He says: bread enough and to spare.

More than is needed. Surplus. A house where the supply is not tight and nobody is rationing and the hired men are not going short.

That is what came into his head in the field, and it is worth noticing that it came into his head as a fact about somewhere else rather than as a hope. He was not encouraging himself. He was remembering how things actually are at his father's, and the memory was accurate.

So the question tonight is not whether there is enough. It is that a man who has spent fifty years counting rooms has been checking the wrong inventory, and the one that would have settled it has never been short.

You are looking at a house with more than enough in it, and that is a fact rather than a hope. Scripture says bread enough and to spare, and the young man was reporting the actual state of his father's household rather than talking himself up; the Holy Spirit is the one who has been at every gathering you have ever counted.

So the hall is not a place where something failed. It is a hundred and ten people who came, and bunting your nieces made, and a man of fifty behind a cake who has just come round, which is the hinge of the whole story and not the end of anything.

And if this is heavier than a page can hold, do not hold it by yourself. Find one real person this week who can sit with you without needing to fix it. If the nights have gone darker than tired, do not wait for a better moment: in the United States you can call or text 988 at any hour and a person will answer.