The Last One in the Canteen

The night crew have gone. He can hear the last of their cars pulling out past the barrier, and the day crew are coming in with their lanyards and their cold air, and he is still at the corner table with a plate that has been empty for ten minutes and a mug he keeps lifting to his mouth as if there were anything left in it.

He does this most mornings. Not every morning. He can go a week eating quickly and leaving with the others, and then there is a run of days when he takes his tray to the corner and eats slower than a man needs to eat toast, and he knows exactly why, and he has never once said why to anybody in this building.

The flat is why. Not the flat itself, which is fine, one bedroom above a launderette, quiet in the daytime. It is what waits in it. Whatever this thing is that he keeps going back to, it is at the flat and it is not in the canteen, and the canteen has people in it: the woman on the till who calls everybody love, the two lads from goods-in arguing about football, the supervisor with the clipboard doing his round of the tables. Nobody here needs him. But he is in a room where people are, and for as long as he sits with the mug, the other thing has to wait.

He would tell you, if you asked him straight, and nobody does, that whatever this actually is, it is not about wanting anybody. He worked that out a long time ago and it did not help, because knowing what a thing is not does not tell you what it is. All he knows is that there is a hunger under it that the thing at the flat has never once fed, and that the canteen at half past six feeds it a little, and that the day crew are sitting down now and he should go.

You know that corner table. You know the run of days when you eat slower than you need to because the room has people in it. And you know, better than anyone who would ever try to explain you to yourself, that this was never about wanting anybody. There is a hunger under it. You are the only one who can say what it is for, and I am not going to say it for you.

You are carrying something with the standing of hunger and not the standing of a fault. Psalm 107:9 says He satisfies the longing soul and fills the hungry soul with goodness, and it names the longing before it names the filling, and the Holy Spirit is at this table and is not embarrassed to be here. But I am going to tell you where it is met, because it is met, and it is not met at the flat.

The hunger is real and He is not embarrassed by it

I want to say the first thing carefully, because it is the thing nobody in the canteen would say to him and the thing he most needs to hear. The ache under this is real. It is not a weakness in you and it is not a symptom of you. It is a hunger, and Scripture is not squeamish about hunger; it uses the word for the deepest thing in a person, and it says where the deepest thing gets fed.

For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.Psalm 107:9

The psalm is about people who wandered in a wilderness, hungry and thirsty, their soul fainting in them, and cried out. That is the whole qualification: hungry, and crying out. It does not say He satisfies the soul that has sorted itself out. It says the longing soul. The hungry soul. The one that has been eating slowly at a corner table for months because it could not name what it wanted and went to the wrong place for it every night.

You are hungry for something real, and God is not ashamed of the hunger, and He has already said out loud that it is His to fill. I am not offering you a theory of yourself. That is written, He satisfies the longing soul, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a psalm off a page and sets it down at a canteen table beside a man who thought his hunger was the problem. The hunger was never the problem. The hunger is the truest thing in the room.

Notice what the psalm does not do. It does not describe the wilderness. It does not tell you what the wanderers had been eating. It names the hunger, it names the crying out, and it names Him. That is the whole method, and it is the whole method here.

Nobody is going to explain you to yourself

Here is what I am not going to do, and I want you to hear the not. I am not going to tell you why this started. I am not going to hand you a root, or a wound, or a name for the pattern. There are places for that, with a real person across a table, and this is not one of them, and a stranger who explains you from a page has done you a small violence even when he is right.

What I am going to do is hand you a sentence to finish, and you finish it, in your own words, and I do not get to see the answer. The sentence is this: what I actually want is. Not what the substitute gives. What you actually want. The man at the corner table would finish it, if he ever did, with something like: to be expected somewhere. Yours may be a different sentence altogether. It is yours. Finish it.

You have a longing that God calls good, and it is being met by Him at the exact place the substitute never reached. Scripture says the hungry soul He fills with good things, and it is His Spirit who meets a hunger on its own terms and never on the substitute's, so the plain sentence you finish is not an accusation, it is an address. It says where the food goes.

And I am not telling you that naming the hunger ends the other thing. It may not, tonight. That is not the promise, and I will not make it. What is promised is narrower and better: that the hunger under it is real, and seen, and being fed by the only One who ever could.