I Set the Extra Place Again

Tonight we are making a stir fry for two with rice, and the only rule is that the pan has to be properly hot before anything goes in it.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put rice on first, because everything else takes eight minutes. Cut whatever vegetables are in the house into pieces roughly the same size, and keep the hard ones separate from the soft ones. Get a wide pan very hot with a little oil, hotter than feels right, then put the hard vegetables in and leave them alone for a minute so they take color before you move them. Two minutes of tossing, then the soft ones, then a chopped clove of garlic and some ginger if you have it for the last thirty seconds only, because garlic burns fast at that heat. Off the heat, add two spoons of soy sauce, a spoon of vinegar and a small spoon of sugar or honey, and toss it so everything glazes. Over rice. It feeds two, it costs a few dollars, and the whole thing is eight minutes.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the stir fry.

It is the extra place.

Your hands set it. Not on purpose. You were carrying plates and thinking about something else and they went down in the pattern they have gone down in for years, and there is one more than there needs to be.

And you do not notice until you sit. And then there is a decision to make, every single night, while the food is going cold: get up and take it away, or leave it there and eat next to it. And neither of those is comfortable, and you have been having that argument with yourself at your own table for a long time.

The king who kept a place at his table

There is a story in Second Samuel where a place at a table is the whole point.

And David said unto him, Fear not: for I will surely shew thee kindness for Jonathan thy father's sake, and will restore thee all the land of Saul thy father; and thou shalt eat bread at my table continually. (2 Samuel 9:7, King James Version)

The reason David does this is a man who is dead. Jonathan is gone, and the love does not stop when the person does, and it has to go somewhere, so it goes to a table.

Notice that David does not treat the love as a problem to be resolved. He gives it a place and a chair and a standing invitation, and the whole arrangement is presented as good rather than as something he needs to be talked out of.

You are carrying a love that outlived a seat at your table, and God has never once treated that as something to be corrected. Second Samuel 9:7 has a king turn a love for somebody absent into a permanent place at a table, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land in a dining room at seven in the evening.

You have not been sentimental or stuck, and heaven has never once required a person's hands to forget faster than their heart does. It is written that he said thou shalt eat bread at my table continually, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the rice is on.

The problem is the accident, not the plate

Now let me be precise about what is actually hard here, because it is not the plate.

If you decided to lay an extra place, it would be a choice, and it would cost you nothing. What is difficult is that your hands do it without asking you, and then you discover it, and the discovery ambushes you at the exact moment you sit down to eat.

That is the whole injury. It is not the memory, it is the ambush. Every night something happens to you at your own table that you did not choose and cannot predict.

An extra plate is not a verdict on how well a person is coping. It is a body remembering, and a body that remembers somebody is not a body that is failing.

You are not going backward, and God has never once measured a person's healing by how quickly their hands changed. The passage puts a permanent place at a table on the side of faithfulness rather than on the side of grief, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the alarm out of an ordinary domestic accident.

You have been ambushed every evening for months, and nobody in that house knows it is happening. Second Samuel 9 has a table arrangement made deliberately and publicly rather than privately and by accident, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a thing from accident to intention.

Decide it on purpose, before you carry the plates

Here is the practical part, and the whole idea is to move the decision earlier.

Tonight, before the plates get picked up, decide how many places go down. Count them out loud if it helps. Two. Then lay two, deliberately, and know that two were chosen.

And if you want to lay three, lay three on purpose. That is genuinely allowed and I mean it. Some people keep a place, and there is a king in Scripture who did exactly that and was commended for it. What is not good for you is having it decided for you by a pair of hands while your mind is elsewhere.

That is the whole change. Not fewer plates. A decision instead of a discovery.

You are allowed to choose this rather than be caught by it, and God has never once handed anybody a table they had to be ambushed at. Second Samuel 9:7 has a place assigned openly and on purpose, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns an accident into a decision at a kitchen counter.