Jesus Wants to Eat With You
My friend’s words come to mind again this morning, about writing during times of adversity or comfort, and I am coming to learn almost everything actionable in my life happens during times of comfort.
I am not by nature an actionable person, unless the action is inaction. I stall, fumble, caveat, circle around, and bypass difficult things by nature, which is why I suppose God has had to foisted many difficulties upon me. I wouldn’t choose them for myself ever. I think that by staying still, like Jonah, sleeping in the hull of a ship during a storm or resting beneath a plant in a desert, I can avoid the things that sanctify, when the truth is God sanctifies, whether we sign up for it or not.
But still, comfort is where I see the growth that happened or is happening or can happen. In a space of relative ease, when the churning around me and within me stops for a moment, I begin to see clearly again.
At the end of the year we bought an armchair and a rocker for our sunroom and here we perch every morning, with our respective hot drinks (locally roasted coffee for him, Yorkshire Gold for me), and the news of the day on our phones, and our Bibles. He begins his day when it is still dark with his Bible and I open mine after he heads to his desk to begin the workday. This is the routine that works for us.
(I feel pangs of guilt sometimes, talking about routines and comfort in these mid-life days, because nearly every one of my friends is followed about by toddlers or teenagers and the mental-emotional-spiritual-physical load of both. But we did not choose our childlessness (and it would have been okay if we did). This is our portion and I have to learn to not apologize for it, which is my natural inclination. “Oh, I’m sorry we don’t have kids and can read our Bibles and drink our coffee in peace. I’m sorry we won’t have the joy of seeing children take first steps or graduate or marry. Or the comfort of grandchildren in our empty nest days. Or the security of children in our old age who care when we’ve fallen down or become sick.” That sounds sarcastic but these are the thoughts that pulse through me nearly every day. I have to take comfort in our morning routines of peace because sometimes it feels like all we have.)
When in my life I have found myself in space long enough to form a routine (which is difficult because I’ve lived in nine states and 25 homes in 20 years), I find my approach to scripture reading changes with the chair in which I sit. In some homes it has been a chair where knowledge was absorbed but my heart wasn’t changed. In other chairs it has been a place where the smallest morsels of God’s word have kept me alive day by day, a sort of manna in a wilderness. In other chairs, I’ve been surrounded by notebooks and commentaries, pen and papers, study-Bibles and podcasts. And in others, the sweet comfort of reading the same book of the Bible repeatedly for a year (I did this with the book of Psalms one difficult year, just shoved off the shame of not reading the words of Paul or Jesus or the prophets of old, just steeped myself in the honest words of minstrels and sinful sons of God). I have spent whole years in the NASB, the ESV, the CSB, and the NIV.
This year I am reading from The Message and I am reading just the New Testament and reading it chronologically. These first few months of the year I’ve paged between the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, sometimes reading about the same moment in the life of Christ four different ways in a week. My plan has me reading just one chapter a day. It takes less than five minutes to read and then another twenty to meditate on the words. And it is bringing me joy, the unapologetic kind, the kind I haven’t had in reading God’s word in a long time.
I think for a long time I felt compelled to make something of my time in God’s word, produce sometimes, prove I’d learned something, or changed something. That I was different because of my time in God’s word, changed from the inside out. Measurably. Quantifiably. As though my time in God’s word was like a laundry cycle, go in dirty, get roughed up a bit, and come out fresh.
But the past few months I’ve just felt, well, comforted. Wrapped in the presence of Christ’s enough-ness for my too-much-ness. Held in the knowledge that he knows me, even if I still don’t know him like I want to. Kept in the surety of his love, as I keep approaching the table of his words, eating them, digesting them, being fortified by them.
And the more I eat these simple words, just one chapter a day from The Message Bible, the Scribe version, the less I have an appetite for what everyone else wants to offer me. And the less I want to offer it to others. I feel a growing distaste for what passes as encouragement these days. The temptation to offer only quips instead of a feast, mere sharables instead of a smorgasbord, is strong within us. It’s been an exhausting year and our brains don’t have the capacity to remember or think or work deeply in the way they did before March of 2020. We’re living on crumbs, not because we don’t want more, but because we don’t think our stomachs can handle more.
But we do want more. I do. You do. We were made to want more. Sometimes, though, more is less.
This is what I’m learning in these first months of 2021: I want more, but more—right now—is less. It is taking a bite instead of shaming myself for not setting a feast. It is tasting a morsel instead of making myself eat more. It is sitting down, getting comfortable, and reading one chapter from one gospel from the whole Bible a day. And in that, I am meeting Jesus, knowing him and being known by him, loving him more and feeling his love more. That’s it.
Jesus doesn’t want us to scrape ourselves down, clean ourselves up, get our “quiet time” right before we approach him, he wants us to know we’re safe, not condemned, and kept by him as we approach him and his words (John 8:1-11). Jesus is more concerned with our safety than our surety. Jesus is more concerned about his approachability than our approach. Jesus cares more about his trust in the Father than our trust in him.
I hope and pray that you are in a place where God’s word feels as safe and good as it is, where the Spirit seems as good and present as He is, where the Savior’s promise to save is as real to you as it is, and where the love of the Father is as true to you as it is. And, if not, I think that’s okay. I think somewhere God has a chair waiting for you where he wants to share how good and kind and gentle and faithful and loving he is, and wants to commune with you through his words. He wants to eat with you.
