The Place Card With No Owner

For the believer who has been acting as landlord of a table she was only ever a guest at.

There's a card in the drawer with no name on it, and it's been there since March.

It's cream, slightly furred at one corner from being handled, and it's the only one left from a set of twelve she bought for a lunch that went well enough. Eleven of them have names written in her careful hand and live in the box. This one she kept blank, and she's taken it out and put it back perhaps thirty times since.

She knows exactly why. It's the card for the place she can never decide about, between two people who both belong to Christ and to rooms that keep their distance from each other. She's held that pen so often the card has gone soft.

What she hasn't noticed is what the drawer says about her. Eleven names and one blank means she's been keeping a register. Somewhere in the last few years, without a single deliberate decision, the woman who cooks the lunch became the woman who administers it.

You've been keeping a register for a table that was never in your name. The written Word shows Christ hosting a meal in a house He didn't own, and the Holy Spirit makes that same ownership real over the table in your own kitchen.

How a Cook Becomes a Landlord

It happens the way most heavy work arrives, which is one reasonable step at a time.

You seat somebody apart once, because a particular week was raw and it seemed kind. It works. So you do it again the following month. Then it becomes the arrangement, then the rule, and after three years you can't remember whether anybody ever actually asked you to.

By then you're running a small and very quiet administration. You hold the seating, the timings, the subjects and the silences. You're the only person who knows where all the tension is buried, because you buried most of it yourself with the best intentions in the world.

And the cost of that is a specific loneliness. Everybody else comes to your table to eat. You come to it to work, and you are the one person there who never quite gets to sit down.

The Guest Who Took the Bread

Here's an account of a meal where the hosting and the owning came visibly apart.

Two men walked seven miles out of Jerusalem with a stranger who opened the Scriptures to them the whole way, and they still didn't know Him. They pressed Him to stay because the day was far spent, which made the house theirs and made Him the guest.

And it came to pass, as he sat at meat with them, he took bread, and blessed it, and brake, and gave to them. And their eyes were opened, and they knew him.Luke 24:30-31 (KJV)

The householder isn't mentioned in that line at all. The guest takes the bread, blesses it, breaks it, and gives it away in a room where he had no standing whatsoever by any ordinary reckoning of hospitality.

You're at a table whose real Host has never once needed the deeds to the house. The written Word puts His hands on the loaf in a borrowed room, and the Holy Spirit makes that hosting present at the table you laid this morning.

A Landlord Collects, a Guest Receives

Here's what I'd carry out of that house in Emmaus if I could take a single thing away with me.

A landlord holds a register. She knows who's in which room, who's paid, who's behind, and who can't be housed next to whom. Every landlord I've ever met is tired, and the tiredness comes from the register rather than the building.

A guest holds nothing. She comes to the door, she's let in, she's given a plate, and the only thing she's responsible for is arriving. That isn't a lesser position. In the account at Emmaus it's the position Christ Himself took.

So the question underneath that soft blank card isn't who should sit there. It's which of those two jobs you've been doing, and how long it's been since anybody handed you a plate.

You were always a guest at the table you've been administering. The written Word puts Christ in the guest's chair with the bread in His hands, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying what you've been carrying in a drawer since March.

I'm Not Ruling on Anybody's Practice

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do harm and I refuse to write it.

I'm not telling you which of those two rooms has understood Him better. Both are full of people who love Christ and who've held that bread carefully for generations, and the care is love, even where it leaves a distance that has cost you thirty trips to a drawer.

I am not ruling on where you should go forward and where you should keep your seat. That belongs to you, your own church and the Lord, and nothing here is a ruling on your conscience or on anybody's table.

You can honor both rooms completely and still lay the card down. The written Word names the owner of the bread and says nothing of the queue, and the Holy Spirit rests you on the part that is already decided.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.