The Reunion and the Long Table

Two days in. There is a long table under the trees that has been extended twice and is now three tables, and there are about sixty people here, and he is related to all of them in one direction or another.

Four branches. His father's side, his mother's side, the ones from his uncle's second marriage who nobody quite knows how to describe, and the group from out of state who come every third year and are the only ones who bring anything decent.

And each of the four holds a version of him.

His father's side has him at about nineteen, which is when most of them last saw him regularly, and their version is affectionate and involves a car he no longer owns and a sense that he was always the one who was going to do something unexpected. They greet him accordingly. It is warm. It is about twenty-five years out of date.

His mother's side has a version from a hard stretch about eleven years ago, and their version is careful with him in a way that is kind and that he has never known how to decline. Somebody asked him, gently, twice yesterday, how things are.

The uncle's-second-marriage group knows him mainly by what he does for work, which they have slightly wrong.

And the out-of-state group have him at his best, because they only ever see him at these, and their version is a man who is funny and generous and has never had a bad forty-eight hours, which is easy to be for a weekend and which he has been doing since he was thirty.

And he has spent two days being greeted, warmly and sincerely, as four different people, and he has not corrected a single one of them.

Because how would you. There is no moment in a reunion for that and there is no sentence that starts it and every one of those versions is held by people who love him and who assembled it out of real evidence.

And he is sitting at the middle table with a plate, being told a story about himself that stopped being true in about 2011, and everybody is laughing, and he is laughing.

And you know that table. You would rather be looked at than known, and you did not choose that, you simply never corrected anything, and now there are four confident and affectionate accounts of you in circulation and not one is current.

So take this in before we go a step further. You are not a liar and you did not construct any of those versions. Psalm 139:1 says O LORD, thou hast searched me, and known me, and both verbs are finished and neither is out of date, and the Holy Spirit is at this table with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

He stopped arguing and handed it over

There is a moment on a beach after breakfast where Peter gets asked the same question three times, and it is the third answer that matters here.

The first two times he answers straightforwardly. Yes, Lord, you know that I love you. And then it comes a third time, and the text says he was grieved, which is not a small word, and here is what he says.

Peter was grieved because he said unto him the third time, Lovest thou me? And he said unto him, Lord, thou knowest all things; thou knowest that I love thee.John 21:17

Lord, thou knowest all things.

Look at what he has stopped doing. The first two answers are Peter making a case, and he is a man with a fairly poor recent record on this exact subject and both of them are, in a sense, defensive. By the third one he has stopped defending anything. He does not produce evidence. He does not refer to the last few weeks. He does not say what he intends to do differently.

He says: you know everything, so you know this, and that is the end of my contribution.

That is a man handing the whole question of who he is over to somebody who already has the answer, and doing it in front of six other people, on a beach, after the worst month of his life.

You are able to hand the whole question over to somebody who already has the answer. The written word records a man giving up on establishing his own case and appealing instead to what is already known, and it is presented as the right answer rather than as a dodge; and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that to a long table under the trees.

And notice who is asking. The one person present who did not need to be told anything. Jesus knew the answer before He asked it three times, and asked anyway, which tells you the asking was for Peter and not for information.

Four accurate versions and none of them current

I want to be exact about what has actually happened, because you are going to be tempted to call it dishonesty and it is not.

Every one of those four versions was accurate when it was made. His father's side did know a nineteen-year-old with a car. His mother's side did see a man in a hard stretch, and were right about it, and were kind about it. The out-of-state group are not seeing a false version; they are seeing what you genuinely are for a weekend every third year.

Nobody was deceived and you did not build anything.

What happened is much duller. Nobody has been in a position to update, and updating requires an occasion, and a family reunion is the one gathering in the calendar that is structurally hostile to any occasion of that sort, because it is short and loud and everybody is performing continuity by design.

Which means it is nobody's fault and it will also never fix itself here.

You were not deceiving anybody, and there is no occasion built into this weekend for an update. John 21:15 has Him asking a question He already knows the answer to, three times, which is somebody making an occasion rather than gathering facts; His Spirit is the one who makes those, and He is not marking your two days.

And here is the second half, and I am going to be careful, because this is the last thing this site says and it would be very easy to tell you what to do with sixty relatives.

I am not going to. Nothing on this page will tell you to correct anybody, or to give a speech, or to have a conversation with your mother's side about eleven years ago, or to tell anybody at that reunion anything at all. You know that family and no page does, and the choosing of the thing and the person is yours entirely.

You are choosing both the what and the whom, and no page and no family gets a vote. Ecclesiastes 4:9 says two are better than one, and it names a number rather than a branch of anybody's family; the same Spirit who had that written is the one who has been at every reunion you have ever attended.

One person, and probably not sixty

Here is the practical thing, and it is a relief.

You do not owe sixty people an update. That is the thought that has been circling for two days and it is worth putting down explicitly, because it is enormous and impossible and it is also not being asked of you by anybody.

Nobody at that table is waiting to be corrected. They are not going to be harmed by holding a version that is twenty-five years old. Your father's cousin can go on thinking about the car for the rest of his life and no harm will come to anybody.

The problem is not that sixty people are out of date. The problem is that nobody is current, and those are different problems with wildly different sizes.

One person being current would solve it. Not the reunion. One.

You need one person who is current, and you have never owed sixty people anything. Scripture says Lord, thou knowest all things, and Peter says it to one, on a beach, rather than announcing anything to a crowd; the Holy Spirit is the one who has been current with you every day of the twenty-five years.

So the long table is not a place where you are being false. It is three tables and sixty people who love four accurate and outdated accounts of somebody, and one man in the middle of it with a plate, who needs exactly one person and not a correction.