The Last Table Wiped Down

A hundred and forty covers, which is the best night since the spring, and the kitchen is closed down and the till is counted and everybody has gone home.

He is wiping the last table.

There is a particular quality to a restaurant at midnight that anybody who has run one knows. The room is still warm from all the people in it. There are chairs up on eleven tables and down on one. The dishwasher is making the noise it makes for about forty minutes after it thinks it is finished. And the whole building smells of a good evening.

He is not unhappy. That is the first thing, and it is important, because if he were unhappy this would be a simpler article.

It went well. He is proud of it. The lamb went out right all night and the new girl on the floor was excellent and a table of nine sang something and his brother-in-law came in and was funny. He fed a hundred and forty people and about ninety of them were glad in his room and told him so.

And he is standing here with a cloth in his hand and there is something missing and he could not tell you what it is.

Not company. He has had company all night, and he will go home to a house with people in it, and his wife will be awake and will ask how it went. He is not describing loneliness. He knows what loneliness is and this is not it.

It is something more like: he has been feeding people for eleven hours and something in him did not eat.

That is the closest he can get, standing there with the cloth, and it sounds absurd when you put it in words, and he has never once said it out loud to anybody, and he has been standing in this room at midnight with this exact feeling for about nine years.

And you know that room. There is a hunger in you and it is not about wanting anybody, and the ordinary answers do not touch it, and you have never had a good enough sentence for it to bother telling anybody.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not ungrateful and there is nothing wrong with you for standing here. Psalm 42:7 says deep calleth unto deep, which is a phrase for something in a person that only answers to something at the same depth, and the Holy Spirit is in this room with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

A question with no reproach in it

There is a question in Isaiah that is one of the most tender things in the book, and everything depends on hearing the tone of it correctly.

Wherefore do ye spend money for that which is not bread? and your labour for that which satisfieth not? hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness.Isaiah 55:2

Read it looking for the scolding. It is not there.

He does not say: you fools. He does not say: after everything I have done for you. He asks a question, and it is the question of somebody watching a person work very hard at something that is not going to feed them, and the tone underneath it is closer to grief than to anger.

And then, immediately, with no interval for repentance and no list of conditions, He says eat.

Eat ye that which is good, and let your soul delight itself in fatness. Delight. Fatness, which in that language is the word for richness and abundance, the good part, the fat of the land. He is not offering a corrective. He is offering a meal.

You are being handed food rather than a rebuke, and that has been the offer the whole time. The written word puts an invitation to eat directly after the question with no conditions in between, which means what is on offer to a man with a cloth in his hand at midnight is a meal and not a diagnosis; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a room that still smells of a good evening.

And notice the beginning of the chapter, which is where this comes from. Ho, every one that thirsteth, come ye to the waters, and he that hath no money; come ye, buy, and eat. Come, he that hath no money. Whatever a person is bringing, it is not the price of admission.

Not naming it is not a failure

I want to say something about the fact that you cannot articulate this, because you have been treating that as evidence that it is not real.

You have a hunger you cannot describe. And because you cannot describe it, you have quietly filed it as something between a mood and an indulgence, and you have never mentioned it to anybody, and part of the reason you have never mentioned it is that any sentence you could produce would sound ridiculous in your own restaurant at midnight.

But an ache that will not go into words is not a smaller ache. It is usually an older and deeper one. The things a person can define are generally the recent ones. And Scripture is entirely unbothered by inarticulate hunger: half the Psalms are people who cannot get to the bottom of what is wrong with them saying so at length to God anyway.

You are not required to define it before you bring it, and the not-defining is not the problem. Psalm 38:9 says Lord, all my desire is before thee; and my groaning is not hid from thee, and groaning there is deliberately not a word for a sentence; His Spirit is the one who translates, and He is not waiting for a better formulation.

And here is the second half, and I want to be careful with it because this is where most writing on this subject goes wrong. I am not going to tell you what this hunger is about. I do not know, and neither does anybody writing at a distance, and the whole trade of explaining a man to himself in print is a bad trade.

What I will say is that it is real, and that it is not a symptom of anything you need to be told about, and that it does not have to be traced to a source before it can be fed. A hungry man does not need an account of why he is hungry. He needs a meal, and the offer in Isaiah is a meal, offered to somebody who has been spending on the wrong things without one word of explanation being requested first.

You are not being asked to explain yourself, and no account is being required before the food. Isaiah 55:1 says come ye, buy, and eat; yea, come, buy wine and milk without money and without price, and the entire transaction is described as costing nothing; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has stood in this room at midnight with you for nine years.

Something in you did not eat

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is not an explanation, it is a permission.

The sentence you got to, standing there with the cloth, is: I have been feeding people for eleven hours and something in me did not eat.

That is a good sentence. That is not absurd and it is not self-pity and it is considerably more honest than most of what gets said out loud in churches. You arrived at it on your own in an empty restaurant, and you have never said it to anybody, and it is exactly the sentence to say.

Not to your wife tonight, necessarily, though you could. Not to a friend, though you should find one eventually. Say it, out loud, in this room, to God, before you turn the lights off.

That is the whole action. Not a resolution, not a plan, not an understanding of where it comes from. One plain sentence, said out loud, to the only person who was in the room with you for the whole eleven hours.

You have the sentence already and it took you nine years to find it, and tonight is the night to spend it. Scripture says hearken diligently unto me, and eat ye that which is good, and the hearkening and the eating are the whole instruction; the Holy Spirit is the one who kept you standing at that last table long enough to get to the sentence.

So the empty room is not a place where something failed. It is a warm room at midnight with one cloth in it, and a man who fed a hundred and forty people, and a hunger that has an actual name now and somewhere to be taken.

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.