We Do Not Have a Table Yet

Three months, two of you, one coffee table that came with the flat and is the wrong height for absolutely everything.

You eat on the floor. She sits with her back against the sofa, you sit cross legged on the other side, and the plates go on the coffee table, which is about nine inches too low, so both of you lean forward in a way that will be a back problem in about fifteen years.

There are still four boxes against the wall. Two of them are books and neither of you is going to unpack books until there is a shelf, and the shelf is on a list.

You have said the phrase when we get a proper table about forty times since June. You have a picture saved. It is the wrong price at the moment. It will be the right price in the autumn, probably.

And it is a running joke, and it is genuinely funny, and neither of you minds.

It is only that you said something on Sunday, half asleep, that you have both been thinking about since. She had made something with far too much garlic in it and you were both on the floor with the plates on that stupid low table, and you said, without meaning anything by it, when we have a proper table we should start saying grace.

And she said, why not now.

And you said something about how it would be weird sitting on the floor. And then the two of you looked at each other for a second, because that is not actually a reason.

The proverb puts the room above the meal

Stay on the floor a minute. I am not going to tell you to buy anything.

Let me say the true thing first, and Scripture will hold me to it and the Spirit is not interested in making two people at the start of something feel behind: three months in with four boxes and a low table is not a household in a waiting room. It is a household. The furniture is not what makes it one and never was, and nobody in that flat is on trial.

But she asked you a decent question on Sunday and you did not have an answer for it, so let me give you the sentence that sits underneath it.

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith.Proverbs 15:17

Read what is being ranked. On one side, herbs: the cheapest possible plate, the meal you serve when there is nothing. On the other, a stalled ox, which is the best meal in that whole world, the thing you kill for a wedding.

And the proverb does not split the difference or say both have their place. It ranks them, decisively, and the deciding factor is not the food and not the room and not the table. It is what is in the house.

Which means the thing you have been waiting for furniture in order to start is the thing what is written already ranked highest before any furniture arrived.

You already have the part that ranks higher, and you have had it since June, and God has never once graded a household by its table. That is not me being encouraging to two people on a floor. That is what is written, and what the proverb weighs and which side it comes down on, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it on a coffee table that is nine inches too low.

Here is what nobody explains about saying something over food. When you speak over that meal, you are not starting a tradition you will have to maintain, and you are not being religious at each other. 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 require a dining room and it does not require either of you to be good at it.

One sentence over two plates on a coffee table is a whole blessing, and it does not get bigger in October when the table arrives. Scripture says every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused, if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), and there is no clause in it about height, and the Spirit is the one who makes that live in a room rather than merely be true in a book.

What when we have a proper table actually is

Now let me name it kindly, because it is one of the most ordinary habits there is and almost nobody sees it while they are doing it.

When we have a proper table is not about the table. It is a way of postponing the beginning of a thing until conditions are right, and the useful property of conditions is that they are never quite right, so the postponement never has to end and nobody ever has to be the one who starts something slightly awkward on a floor.

You are not procrastinating out of laziness. You are doing it because starting is exposing, and it is much easier to start once a room looks like the sort of room where that kind of thing happens.

That is not a fault and I am not going to make it one. It is how almost everybody handles a first flat. And what is written never once required a household to be established before it could be blessed. The Spirit is not waiting on the autumn either.

God is in that flat on the floor, and He was in it before the boxes came, and He is not standing in the hall waiting to be shown into a dining room. It is written that where two or three are gathered together in His name, there am I in the midst of them (Matthew 18:20), a sentence deliberately built to include exactly two people, and the same Spirit who breathed it is on that floor with you, which is why it reads as a fact about the room and not as a nice sentiment about small beginnings.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to make this every night, or to hold hands, or to take turns, or to build anything you will both be quietly dreading by November. Nothing here is a practice and nothing here is inspected. If you do it once and it is awkward and you never mention it again, it was still said.

What you say over two plates on the floor is a real thing, and it is not a rehearsal for the real one later. 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 too much garlic is not doing a smaller version of anything.