There are three crock pots on one extension cord and somebody is going to trip over it before the night is out.
The fellowship hall has the paper tablecloths taped down at the corners because the door keeps blowing open. Foil pans down one side: macaroni, green bean casserole with the fried onions on top, a ham somebody's husband is very proud of. Two identical Jell-O salads at the dessert end, which happens every single time and which everybody has agreed not to mention. The coffee urn ticking. A folding chair with a stack of napkins on it because the napkins would not fit anywhere else.
She is at the end of the table with a paper plate already flexing in the middle.
Beside her, two women she loves. One is telling the other that God told her on Tuesday to call her sister, and she called, and her sister had been sitting on the side of the bed with the phone in her hand. The other one says she woke at four in the morning with a word for somebody at work, just that clear, just that specific, and she wrote it on the back of a bank envelope.
And she stands there with the plate flexing and says, that is so good. And means it. And moves her plastic fork half an inch to the left.
Because she has not heard anything she would call a voice in months.
It is not that she stopped. She reads in the morning, four or five verses, more if the coffee is slow. She prays in the car and while she folds towels. She is at everything on the calendar; she is here tonight with a bowl of coleslaw she made at lunchtime. But if she is honest, and she has never said this out loud to a living soul, it has been a long quiet, and the quiet has started to feel like a piece of information about her.
Somebody puts a hand on her back on the way past to the ham. The extension cord holds. The urn ticks.
You know the end of the table. Yours might be a small group, or a car ride, or a text thread where everybody is hearing things and you are not. And you know the exact sentence you say so the moment can move on, and how much you mean it, and the arithmetic that starts up underneath it anyway.
God fed him before He said a word to him
Come around this end of the table with me a minute, because there is a man in Scripture who once stood exactly where you stand tonight, and the story is not the one people usually tell.
Elijah had just come off the biggest public day of his life. Fire on Carmel, the whole nation watching, God answering out loud in front of everybody. And a few verses later he is a day into the wilderness, sitting under a juniper tree, asking to die.
Watch what God does about it. He does not correct him. He does not explain the theology of discouragement. An angel touches him and there is a cake baked on the coals and a cruse of water at his head, and he eats and lies down again. And the angel comes back a second time and touches him again and says: arise and eat, because the journey is too great for thee (1 Kings 19:7). Food. Sleep. Food again. Then, and only then, forty days of walking.
You are being fed in a season when you are hearing nothing, and that is the order God used with a prophet He was not the least bit disappointed in. It is written that the angel came twice with bread before a single word of instruction, and the Spirit who kept Elijah alive under that tree is not running a different economy in a fellowship hall on a Thursday night.
I want you to feel how tender that is. The man was at the bottom. God's first move was breakfast.
The loud things came and God was not in them
Then Elijah gets to the mountain and stands in the cave, and God tells him to come out and stand before Him, and what happens next is the sentence I want in your hand tonight.
And, behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind rent the mountains, and brake in pieces the rocks before the LORD; but the LORD was not in the wind: and after the wind an earthquake; but the LORD was not in the earthquake: and after the earthquake a fire; but the LORD was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice.1 Kings 19:11-12
Three enormous events, three times the text says the LORD was not in it. And then a thing so quiet that the Hebrew behind still small voice is closer to a thin, hushed sound, almost a silence you could hear. That is what Elijah wrapped his face in his mantle for.
You have not been standing outside anything because your week was quiet. 1 Kings 19:12 is the verse that says out loud what God did not choose, and the Spirit who was in the thin sound and not in the fire has never once measured a person by the volume of what reached them.
And I am not going to do the thing you are braced for. I will not take your quiet and stand it next to your friend's four in the morning and make one of them the standard. She heard something and it was good and I am glad. You did not, this week, and I will not read that as a report card, because Scripture does not hand out marks for reception and neither will I.
The food on this table is the word
Here is where the quiet gets fed, and it is more ordinary than anybody wants it to be.
Jesus, in a wilderness of His own, quoted Deuteronomy back at the enemy: man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God (Matthew 4:4). Every word that proceeds. Present tense, still coming out. And Peter tells new believers to desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby (1 Peter 2:2), which is the plainest sentence about growth in the whole New Testament and it points at one thing.
The five verses over slow coffee are not the runner up. They are not what you do while you wait for the real channel to open. That is the food. It is the mouth of God, written down and handed to you in a form that does not depend on you waking at four in the morning.
You have been eating this whole time, in a kitchen, with the coffee still dripping. His word is what Jesus called the food and the Spirit is the one who takes it off the page and puts it into a person, which is why a slow morning with four verses is not a lesser meal than a bank envelope at four in the morning.
I am not telling you God does not speak in other ways. He does what He does, and I would not shrink Him to fit anybody's week, including yours. What I am telling you is that the staple has been on your table all along, and you have been counting it as nothing because it did not arrive with weather.
Here is what turns, at the end of a table, with the plate flexing and the urn ticking.
You have been reading a quiet season as a message about yourself. It is not. God fed a man twice and let him sleep before He said anything, and when He did speak He deliberately let the wind and the earthquake and the fire go by first. The volume was never the point, and the arithmetic you run underneath your friends' good news is measuring the wrong thing entirely.
You are being kept and fed by God in this quiet exactly as deliberately as anybody in this room is being spoken to in theirs. It is written that the LORD was not in the fire, and the Holy Spirit who came in the thin sound after it is the one at work in five verses over slow coffee, and He has not been absent from a single one of these months.
So go get the ham. Laugh at the two Jell-O salads. Let your friend tell the story about her sister and be glad with her all the way down, because her Tuesday takes nothing from you. I will not tell you when this quiet lifts, or what it is for, or promise you a four in the morning of your own, because God has not told me and I will not invent it. What I will tell you is that you are not on the outside of the room and you never were. You are at the table, and the table has food on it.
Declare this over yourself
Now say these three, quietly, at the end of the table or out by the coat rack. The standing to say them is not a full notebook. You are in Christ and Christ is in you, and that is the whole authority behind a voice in this hall tonight. Scripture is the ground under every line and the Holy Spirit is what carries it, so a mumble over a paper plate carries exactly as far as a testimony from a platform. And what God does with these words, and when, is entirely His, which we say gladly: not my will, but Thine.
- Quiet of these last months, you are not an absence and you are not a verdict on me. 1 Kings 19 says the LORD was not in the wind and not in the fire, and what came after the fire was thin and quiet and it was still Him.
- Fear that I am the one He does not talk to, get out of this fellowship hall, in the name of Jesus. It is written that man lives by every word out of the mouth of God, and His Spirit has been feeding me four verses at a time over slow coffee all year, so I am done counting my meals as nothing.
- Lord, You fed Elijah twice and let him sleep before You said one word to him, and the word says the journey was too great for him. I am taking a roll off that basket and reading one line out loud, and I am going back in there to be glad about my friend's Tuesday with my whole heart.
1 Kings 19:12
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