Nobody Took Your Seat At the Fry

The fry is on the pier on the second Friday, the way it has been on the second Friday for longer than anybody can remember, and at seven the light comes down the water and turns the whole thing the color of the oil in the pots.

Two propane burners. Three folding tables end to end. A cooler of lemonade with a dented lid. Maybe forty people, most of them the same forty.

Cal is on the pier tonight because his nephew works the fryer now and asked him to bring down a box of paper trays from the truck, and Cal said yes before he thought about it, and has been regretting it since the turn onto the harbor road.

Two years ago he had an argument on this pier.

Not a small one. The kind that goes up fast and loud in front of everybody, out where the gulls are, over something that did not matter and was never actually the thing. He said a sentence he can still hear in his own voice. Then he put his hands on the rail and looked at the water for a while, and then he walked to his truck and drove home, and he did not come back the next month, and once you have missed one it is easy to miss twelve.

He carries the box down the pier with his eyes about waist height, which is a thing a man learns to do.

At the far table somebody has stacked two coolers on a chair to keep the lids off the boards.

And when Cal gets close, a woman he has known since school lifts the coolers off without looking up from what she is saying, and sets them on the deck, and pushes the chair out with her foot.

It is a green folding chair with frayed webbing on one arm. There is a strip of tape on the leg with a mark on it that Cal put there himself, a long time ago, so it would stop getting mixed in with the church hall chairs.

Nobody is sitting in it. Nobody has been sitting in it.

Cal stands there holding a box of paper trays.

That is your question too.

You took yourself out of something. Maybe loudly, maybe by simply not going back, and either way the leaving felt like the only decent thing available to you at the time. And you have spent a long stretch since then quietly certain that the place closed behind you, because places do close, and because it is easier to be sure of that than to walk down a pier and find out.

You are invited, right now, as you read this, and the invitation was not withdrawn while you were gone. That is not a hopeful reading of your situation, it is what the written word says about everyone the Father gives the Son, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old sentence land on a man carrying a box.

Read the sentence with both halves in it

There is a line of Jesus that people carry around in pieces, and the piece they carry is usually the second half. Here is the whole thing.

All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out.John 6:37

Notice what comes first. All that the Father giveth me. A whole given company, handed over as one thing, and the coming of any single person happens inside that giving rather than instead of it. This is the plain sense of the bride language too, and it is worth saying flatly: in Scripture the bride is the church, a whole people, corporate, the way a nation is called God's own. It is never a private arrangement between Christ and a reader and it is never a romance. The welcome belongs to a people, and you are in the people.

Then the second half, and look at how it is built. Not I will welcome the ones who come back well. Not I will consider each case. In no wise cast out, which is the flattest and most absolute way that could have been said, with every exception closed off in advance.

You have a welcome that was settled before you ever walked away from anything. The word says He casts out no one at all, in no wise, and it is His Spirit who keeps that sentence true on a Friday two years later.

The chair was not a decision anybody made about you

Here is the thing I most want you to see about that green chair.

Nobody sat down at a meeting and voted to keep it. There was no discussion of Cal, no reconsideration, no vote taken and passed narrowly. The chair was at the table because the chair belongs at the table. It has tape on the leg with his mark on it. The coolers went on it because it was empty, and the coolers came off it because he arrived.

You have been imagining a decision that was never made. A quiet judgment, a name crossed through, a sentence somebody said about you after you left. And two years of your thinking has been shaped around a meeting that never took place.

You are not on the wrong side of a decision, because the decision that governs this was made about a whole company and it was made in your favor. Scripture says all that the Father gives the Son come to Him, and the Holy Spirit does not keep a separate register of the ones who left badly.

I am not going to ask you for anything

Let me be plain about what this message is and is not.

This is not an appeal. I am not asking you to go anywhere on Sunday. I am not setting you a date, and I am not going to tell you that time is short or that you have wasted the years, because I do not believe you have and because that kind of pressure is exactly what a man in your position has learned to hear coming.

The invitation is a fact, not a lever. It is being stated, and then it will go on being true whether you move this week or not.

And the two years are not a debt. You are not standing in arrears with God, and nothing about the welcome has gone up in price while you were away. His word puts the whole of it on Christ's refusal to cast anybody out, and His Spirit is not running a meter on the time between.