Twenty Years and the Same Table

Same pub. Same table, more or less, the one by the window with the wobble in it that somebody has been fixing with a beer mat since roughly 2009.

Five of them. School, and then the years, and then this: twice a year, a Sunday, and the stories. And the extraordinary thing about the stories is that they have not changed at all. The one about the minibus. The one about the teacher and the fire door. They have been told so many times that the telling has become a sort of liturgy and nobody would dream of shortening it.

Everybody got older except the stories.

One of them is doing well and one of them is not and both of them are handling it beautifully. One has three children and shows you photographs before you have finished asking. One has been quietly divorced for two years and mentioned it in about eleven words and everybody handled that beautifully too, which is one of the things that is genuinely good about men who have known each other since they were eleven.

And him.

He is having a lovely time. He would tell you so on the drive home and mean it. He is also, for the entire two hours, running an assessment.

Not of them. Of himself, against them. Where he has got to. What he would be able to say if the conversation went a particular way. Whether the version of his life he presents at this table is holding up under twenty years of comparison. And underneath all of it, the one thing none of those four men knows about him, sitting there like a stone in a shoe.

Sit down here at the end of the table with me a minute, and let me say the sentence that matters most before anything else. I am not going to ask you to tell anybody. Not today, not eventually, not as the version of yourself you keep meaning to become. I will not guess what it is and I am not going to offer you a list. Nothing here wants the thing itself, and a man who never tells another living soul is a whole man and a whole reader of this site.

Paul closes the court, and he closes it on everybody

There is a moment where Paul is being assessed by people in Corinth, and he says something that sounds like a man defending himself and is actually a man dismantling the whole apparatus.

Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who both will bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts: and then shall every man have praise of God.1 Corinthians 4:5

Read the first four words as an instruction, because that is what they are. Judge nothing before the time. The hearing is not now. It is not scheduled for a Sunday lunch and it is not open for the public.

And a line earlier he says something even better. He says that it is a very small thing to him to be judged by them or by any human court, and then, and this is the part almost everybody misses, yea, I judge not mine own self.

He shuts the court on the men in Corinth, and then he shuts it on himself in the same breath. He will not sit as his own judge. He says he knows nothing against himself, and then says that even that does not make him the one qualified to rule, because the Lord is the one who judges him.

You are not the judge in your own case, and you were never appointed to the bench you have been sitting on for twenty years. I am not offering you an easy ride. The written word takes the gavel out of Paul's hand and out of everybody else's in the same sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a man at a table by a window.

And then shall every man have praise

Now the end of that verse, because it is the part that has been quietly stolen from readers like you.

Paul says the hidden things will be brought to light, and if you carry something unspoken, that clause is where your eye stops and your stomach turns over.

Do not stop there. Read the last eight words. And then shall every man have praise of God.

Praise. That is where he says the hearing lands for those who are His. Not exposure as an end in itself, not a public shaming as the final scene of the story. He has just described the one moment everybody dreads and he ends the sentence with commendation.

You are heading toward a hearing that ends in praise, and you were never walking toward a room where God finally says the worst thing about you. That is what the written word says in as many words at the end of that verse, and it is His Spirit who makes a promise about a future day change how a man sits at a table today.