We Only Sit Down on Sundays

Kate counted the meals for a week, which was a mistake she made on purpose.

Twenty-one meals. She sat down for four of them, and three of those four were on Sunday.

The rest were eaten in the doorway, at the counter, in the car between two places, standing at the sink while somebody was talking to her from another room, and once, on the Wednesday, walking to the bus with the thing in her hand.

It is not a crisis. That is what she said to herself and it is true. The children are fed and they are fine and nobody in that house is going without.

Sunday is different. Sunday there is a table and there is enough time and the phones go on the side and it takes an hour and a half and it is genuinely lovely, and Kate looks forward to it from about Thursday.

And somewhere in the middle of that week of counting, she understood that she does exactly the same thing with God.

Sunday she sits down. Properly. Ninety minutes, phone off, the good part of her attention. She is present in a way she is not present anywhere else in her week and she means all of it.

And the other six days are the doorway and the counter and the car.

Not nothing. She would push back if you said nothing. There is something in the morning most days, quickly, and she prays in traffic and she means that too.

But she eats standing up, and she has for years, and she has slowly come to expect that being fed is a Sunday activity and the rest of the week is transit.

She is forty-two.

And the thing that arrived at the sink on the Thursday, with a plate in her hand and the tap running, was not guilt. It was a much plainer thought, which is that she is hungry on Wednesdays and has stopped noticing, in the way a person stops noticing a noise.

And you may know that count. Yours may come out differently and it may come out worse, and you may have organized a whole life around one sitting down.

The first church did this in houses, on ordinary days

Take this off before we go any further, because you have carried it for years and it was never yours.

You are not being fed only on Sundays because that is all He gives. You never were. Scripture describes a church eating together in ordinary houses on ordinary days, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the size of the occasion, who does the feeding. Set that down here at the sink. It is heavy and it has been in the doorway with you all week.

Now hear the sentence, and notice how domestic it is.

Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts.Acts 2:46

In their homes. Every day. Glad and sincere.

Three ordinary words doing the whole work. Not a description of an occasion. A description of a rhythm, in kitchens, among people who were also doing their washing and their work, in the same week as each other.

And the gladness is attached to the frequency rather than to the rarity. Nothing in that sentence is holding out for a big one.

That rhythm is available to you. Right now, at forty-two, on a Wednesday, in a house where the phones are not off. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who does the feeding, and He has never once required an hour and a half.

Now let me be careful here, because this is the place where a message like this can do harm, and I have no intention of doing any.

Nothing on this page is a comment on how your church does anything. Not the frequency, not the practice, not the shape of it. That belongs entirely to your church and it stays exactly where it is, and I am not putting a view about it into your head and you should not accept one from a page.

And nothing here says Sunday is the problem. It is not. Ninety minutes with your phone off is a good thing and your children will remember that table and so will you, and Scripture has plenty of room for a set day and always has.

The point is only that six days have quietly become transit, and Scripture puts the eating in the houses on the ordinary days as well, and His Spirit is the one who has been there through every one of them.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. What you found at the sink was not a failure of devotion.

It was a woman who has been fed well once a week for so long that she has stopped registering hunger in between, and stopped hunger is not contentment, it is just quiet. His Spirit is not disappointed with you and He has been at the counter the whole time.