Supper in a Lay-By Five Nights a Week

Half past eight, somewhere north of Grantham, engine off, one light on, and a sandwich in foil that your wife made this morning at six.

There is a flask. There is usually a banana that survives about two days before you give up on it. There is a bag of something you should not have and always do.

You eat it on the wheel. That is the phrase you use in your own head, on the wheel, and it is accurate: your left forearm on the top of it, the foil open on your lap, the radio down low, the window cracked because otherwise it goes stale in there.

Twenty-two minutes. You have never timed it and you know it is twenty-two minutes.

You have done this five nights a week for fourteen years. And it does not register as a meal. If somebody asked you what you had for dinner you would say you had not really had one, and then you would remember the sandwich.

Tonight there is a family at the picnic table at the other end of the lay-by, out of a car with a roof box, doing something with a cool bag, and one of the kids is complaining about wasps. And you sat there with the foil open watching them for a second longer than you meant to.

Not envy exactly. It is that they are having a meal and you are having twenty-two minutes.

They asked the question and God answered it

Sit still a minute with the foil where it is. I am not going to tell you to eat better or to get a proper break.

Let me put a true thing down first, because Scripture would not let me be soft about it and the Spirit is not interested in tidying your life up: fourteen years of eating on a wheel is not a meal in any sense that a family at a picnic table would recognize, and pretending otherwise would be no use to you. Nobody is on trial in this cab, and neither is the job, and neither is a woman who got up at six.

Now come and look at a question that got asked in the desert in a bad temper.

Yea, they spake against God; they said, Can God furnish a table in the wilderness?Psalm 78:19

That is a complaint. The psalm is quite clear that it is a complaint, and it is recorded as one, and the people asking it were not in a good state and were not asking politely.

But look at the shape of what they asked, because they picked the right question by accident. Can God furnish a table in the wilderness. Not in a house. Not in a settled country with a kitchen in it. Out there, in the place where a table does not belong.

And the answer, all through that chapter and all through the forty years, is yes. Bread on the ground in the morning. Water out of a rock. Not a picnic table with a cool bag, and not a dining room, and no cloth on anything. God furnished a table where there was no table, and the food He put on it was so unlike a meal that they had to invent a word for it, which was, roughly, what is it.

Your cab in a lay-by north of Grantham is a table God is perfectly capable of furnishing, and He has been furnishing it for fourteen years. That is not me dressing up a sandwich. That is what is written, and the question the psalm asks and the answer the whole chapter gives, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a truck at half past eight.

Here is what nobody explains about saying something over food. When you speak over that sandwich, you are not upgrading it and you are not pretending it is a roast. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about His own provision. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it. It does not need a table to come through.

A blessing over a sandwich in foil is not smaller than a blessing over a Sunday dinner. Scripture says nothing is to be refused if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), and there is no clause anywhere in it about the venue, and the Spirit is the one who makes that true in a cab rather than merely correct in a book.

What twenty-two minutes has become

Now let me name it straight, because I think you have never put words on it and it has been going on a long time. What is written names it without fuss, and the Spirit is not lecturing a man about his job.

Somewhere in fourteen years, eating stopped being a thing you do and became a thing you get through. It is not a break; it is a gap between two stints. It is refueling, and the language you use about it in your own head is refueling language.

And a man who refuels for fourteen years slowly stops expecting anything at all from that part of the day, which is fine on a Tuesday and does something to a person over a decade. You did not notice because there was nothing to notice. Nobody was there.

That is not weakness and I am not going to call it that. It is a man doing a hard job efficiently, and what is written never once required a proper table before a word was worth saying. The Spirit is not waiting for you to get home.

God is at that lay-by, and He is not visiting it, and He has been in that cab for every one of the twenty-two minutes. It is written that whither shall I go from thy spirit, or whither shall I flee from thy presence, and that if a man takes the wings of the morning and dwells in the uttermost parts of the sea, even there His hand leads him (Psalm 139:7-10), which is David going out of his way to name the least likely places, and the same Spirit who breathed that is in this cab tonight.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to change the job, to stop for longer, to get out and eat at the picnic table, or to take up anything. Nothing here is a regime and nothing here is graded. If tomorrow you eat it in nine minutes with the engine running, nothing is lost.

What you say on a wheel with the window cracked is a real thing, and it is complete with nobody there but you and God. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a man saying nine words over foil is doing exactly what a family at a picnic table would be doing if they thought of it.