The Bread Beneath the Pot Lid

For the household that fears an ordinary supper cannot hold a holy moment.

Picture a kitchen at about seven in the evening, with a pot on the hob and the lid tipped to one side, and half a loaf keeping warm underneath it.

There are four of you. One is still in work clothes with paint on them from a job that overran. The youngest is under the table for reasons that nobody has thought it worth investigating. There's a plate with a chip out of it that everybody fights not to get, and the tablecloth was clean on Monday.

Somebody says the words, quickly, before the food goes round. It takes about eleven seconds from start to finish. Then the pot lid comes off and the evening carries on the way it always does.

Afterwards, when the plates are stacked and the youngest has been extracted from under the table, one of you says that it doesn't feel like a proper thing. That it's a nice habit and no more than that. That the real version happens somewhere else, with considerably more care taken over it.

He chose the unpolished table on purpose, and their eyes were opened at a supper nobody prepared for. The written word records where it happened, and the Spirit was in a borrowed kitchen at the end of a long day.

What Proper Has Come to Mean

Take apart the word proper, because you have let it do a great deal of work in that kitchen without once examining it.

Proper means prepared in advance. It means a cloth that was put on for the purpose, a quiet room, a person whose job it is, and everybody knowing when to be still. It means the thing was arranged before anybody arrived.

That's a real and good description of something. It's also, and this is the part worth noticing, a description of an event rather than a meal.

Events have a start time. Somebody decides when they happen, somebody prepares the room, and everybody who attends knows they are attending. All of that is fine and none of it is what happens in a kitchen at seven o'clock.

The evening you are describing as improper is a meal. Food on a hob, people who live together, a chipped plate, a child under the table. Whatever else it is, it's the thing the word supper actually means.

Your kitchen is failing a test that describes an event rather than a supper. The written word puts the moment at a meal, and the Spirit has not moved it since.

As He Sat at Meat With Them

Here's the passage, and every detail in it is worth slowing down over.

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; and he vanished out of their sight.Luke 24:30-31 (KJV)

He sat at meat with them. This is supper. Two men who'd walked seven miles, in a house that wasn't His, with food that somebody had thrown together for an unexpected guest at the end of a day.

Nothing about it was arranged in advance. There was no preparation of any kind, nobody in the room knew who He was until the bread was in His hands, and the whole evening had been improvised from the moment they pressed Him to stay.

They had not even meant to eat with Him. He made as though He would have gone further, and they stopped Him, and supper followed from a decision made on a doorstep at dusk.

Luke wrote that about two ordinary disciples on the road to a village nobody remembers, and it reaches past them to a kitchen with a pot lid tipped on the hob.

Their eyes were opened at a meal that nobody had arranged. The written word puts the recognition at a supper, and the Spirit was in the improvising.

Eleven Seconds Is Not Carelessness

Defend the household here, because you have accused yourselves of something you have not done.

Somebody said the words quickly, before the food went round, and that speed has been read as carelessness. It isn't. It's what people do at a table with hot food on it and a child underneath it.

You are not choosing between speed and reverence, because they were never opposites. A quick word said honestly before a meal, every night, for years, is a practice. A long word said beautifully four times a year is an occasion, and the first of those shapes a household while the second is remembered fondly.

Ask anybody who grew up with both which one they still do. It will be the eleven seconds, every time, and usually without them being able to remember a single evening it was said on.

Your eleven seconds are said by people who mean them, at a table they eat at every day, in the hearing of children who will still be doing it in thirty years without knowing where they got it.

Eleven honest seconds every evening is a practice rather than a shortcut. The written word places it inside an ordinary meal, and the Spirit works in the repetition rather than in the length.

I Am Not Telling You Care Does Not Matter

Be careful, because this isn't an argument for doing it badly.

Take care over it. Slow down when you can, look at the bread before you break it, and let the room be quiet for a moment if the room will allow it. Care is good, and it's right to want more of it than a Tuesday usually permits.

Nor am I telling you that a room with other believers and more silence in it has nothing you need. It may have a great deal, and if it opens to you, go.

What I want off you is the verdict on your own table. Not the wish for more care. Not the memory of how it was.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Imani This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.