Eating Slowly at the Mens Breakfast

The eggs come out of a foil pan in one solid piece, and there is a coffee urn at the end of the table with a paper cup tower beside it that somebody has to rebuild every twenty minutes.

Second Saturday of the month. Fellowship hall. Eight round tables with the folding chairs already scraped into rings, biscuits under a dish towel, gravy in a crock pot, and a clipboard by the door where you write your name so the kitchen knows how many. Dale is forty four. He has been coming for six years and he has never once missed a Saturday, because he likes these men and because his father came to this same room for thirty years and there is something in that.

Around eight fifteen a man at the front taps a cup with a spoon and says, let us go around and share what the Lord has done. And Dale, without deciding to, cuts his sausage into smaller pieces.

He does this every time. Not on purpose the first time. But it works. A man with food in his mouth can lift a hand, chew, nod at the next man, and the ring keeps moving. Then he takes another bite and cuts again, small, and by the time it comes back to his side of the table, the sharing has gone past.

Because every story in this room opens the same way. Before I met the Lord I was drinking every night. Before I met the Lord I was on my third marriage and did not care. Before I met the Lord, man, you would not have wanted to know me. Then the turn, and the room goes quiet in the right way, and somebody says amen, and it is beautiful. Dale means the amen. He has heard Ray tell his in this room maybe eleven times and it has never gotten smaller.

Dale has no before.

He was five and it was a Thursday in the back room with the paper cups of grape juice and his mother in the doorway, and there was no drinking, no third marriage, nothing anybody would want to know. He cannot point to a night. He cannot point to a year. And he has quietly worked out, over about three decades, that a man with no before is a man with no proof, and that the sensible thing to do at eight fifteen on the second Saturday is to cut his food very small.

You know the plate. Yours might be a small group, a testimony night, a new membership class with a line on the form asking when. And you know the arithmetic that runs while the ring comes around: everybody else has a night, and you have a Thursday you were told about afterward.

The psalm with no before in it

Let me tell you what a table in my family is for.

Bread goes on it before anybody sits down. Not because the guest has proved anything, and not because the house knows his story. The bread is out because the house has decided in advance that whoever walks in belongs at it. A man is not asked at that table how he got there. He is asked whether he has eaten.

Now hear the oldest testimony in the book, and notice what is not in it.

I was cast upon thee from the womb: thou art my God from my mother's belly.Psalm 22:10

The verse before it says the same thing from the other side: You took me out of the womb, You made me hope while I was on my mother's breast. That is a man telling his whole beginning, and there is no rescue scene in it. There is no night. There is no year. There is a God who had hold of him before he had words, and a man who could not tell you the hour because he was not conscious for it.

You have a beginning that is already written into the Scriptures, and you have it in the one psalm the Lord Himself carried with Him to the cross. Psalm 22 is where the opening cry of Golgotha comes from, and ten verses in it says a man was cast upon God from the womb; the same Spirit who breathed that psalm out is the one holding it open in a fellowship hall on a Saturday morning.

Sit with how strange that is. If a dramatic before were the qualification, the psalm at the center of the passion would be the wrong psalm. It would have to be replaced with something louder.

You are inside the oldest testimony in the book, and you were inside it before you could hold a spoon. It is written that God took a man out of the womb and was his God from his mother's arms, Psalm 22:9-10, and the Spirit who put that sentence in the record put it there for the men with no night to point at.

Timothy had a grandmother

There is a second man, and Paul names him in a letter, and Paul is not usually accused of going soft on anybody.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.2 Timothy 1:5

Read the word Paul chose. Unfeigned. Not counterfeit, not put on. He is describing a faith that arrived in a boy the way bread arrives on a table, through a grandmother and a mother, and he calls it the real thing without qualification. This is the man Paul left in charge at Ephesus.

You have the same kind of history Timothy had, and it was named in a letter as unfeigned faith rather than a lesser grade of it. 2 Timothy 1:5 says it dwelt first in Lois, then Eunice, then him, and it is the Holy Spirit who keeps that sentence from reading as a consolation prize a hundred generations later.

And Paul goes further in the third chapter. From a child thou hast known the holy scriptures, he tells him, 2 Timothy 3:15. He says it as an advantage. He is not apologizing for the man's childhood. He is leaning on it.

You have known the Scriptures since you were small, and that is entered in the record as a gift and never as a gap. 2 Timothy 3:15 puts it there in plain words, and the Spirit who moved on the men who wrote them does not hand a man a smaller portion for having been given them early.

What a witness actually is

A witness, in the courts of every country I have ever been in, is not the loudest person in the room. A witness is the one who was there. His job is to say what he saw. Nobody asks a witness to make it interesting.

There is a man in John's ninth chapter who had every reason to feel underqualified. He was interrogated twice, by professionals, about a thing he could not explain, and what he finally said was: one thing I know, that whereas I was blind, now I see. John 9:25. That is the whole speech. It has outlived every clever question put to him that day.

You are qualified to say what you have seen, and you were never asked for anything more than that. John 9:25 is the shortest testimony in the Gospels and the record kept it, and the Spirit who bears witness with a man's own spirit does not need him to be dramatic in order to be true.

So look at what you would actually say, if the eggs were not in the way. Not a rescue scene. Something more like this: I have never known a day without Him. I have been in this room since I was five. He has held me the whole time and I could not tell you the hour because I was not old enough to check a clock.

Say that out loud in a fellowship hall and watch what happens. Some men in that ring have been trying to get back to something they can barely remember, and here is a man who never left it.

You are free to eat at the speed of a man with nothing to hide, and you were free the whole time. It is written that the Lord looks on the heart, 1 Samuel 16:7, and His Spirit is the one who settles a man in a chair so that a plate becomes a plate again instead of a place to hide behind.