Breakfast on the Shore

There are four people in that house and he can name, precisely, the last real conversation he had with each of them, and three of the four were more than a year ago.

It is not a bad house. Nobody would look at it and think anything. There is no shouting, nothing has broken, they eat together most nights, and if you asked any of the four whether they love each other they would say yes and mean it.

He is forty one, and what he has is a house where everything is fine and nothing gets said.

He has thought about it more than he has told anybody. He has landed, over about eighteen months, on a conclusion, and the conclusion is this: the only thing that would fix it is a conversation. A proper one. The kind where somebody says the true thing first and then it opens.

And he cannot start it.

He has tried three times, in his head, in bed, at length, and worked out how it would go, and every version dies at the same place, which is the second sentence, because he does not know what the second sentence is.

So nothing happens. Eighteen months of nothing happening, in a house where everything is fine.

He is on the back porch on a Saturday evening with a fire in the pit because the youngest asked, and he is doing the thing with the pan because that is a job and a job is something he can do out here without having to say anything.

There is a chapter at the end of John where seven men come in from a night of catching nothing and find somebody on the beach with a fire already going.

Come and dine

I have to be careful here, and considerably more careful than usual, because this is where somebody normally hands over a task. Have the conversation. Be vulnerable. Open up to your family. I am not going to do that. A man who has died at the second sentence three times does not need to be told to try a fourth, and the advice assumes that the only way into a house is through a doorway he has already found to be locked.

John 21. Seven of them have fished all night and caught nothing, which is its own particular kind of morning. And there is somebody on the beach.

And when they had come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread (John 21:9).

The fire is already lit. The fish is already on it. He did not wait for them to come in with something; He was cooking before the boat touched the sand.

And then, when they get there, He says four words: Come and dine (John 21:12).

That is it. No opening speech. No conversation about the last three years, which included the worst thing Peter ever did and which is definitely in the air on that beach. Breakfast first.

You are being handed a table rather than a conversation. That is not me avoiding the hard part of the chapter; John 21:12 is four words and food, and the Holy Spirit who preserved that scene put the meal before the conversation and not after it.

And the hard conversation does happen. It is in verse fifteen, and it is the one about do you love me, and Peter is restored in it. But it happens when they have eaten. The chapter has an order and the order is: fire, fish, come and dine, and then the words.

Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine. And none of the disciples durst ask him, Who art thou? knowing that it was the Lord.John 21:12

The second sentence was never the entrance

Now the thing that has had him stuck for eighteen months.

He has been waiting to be able to start a conversation, and he cannot, and so nothing has moved. And the whole structure rests on an assumption: that the conversation is the door, and that everything else in a house waits behind it.

John 21 does not work that way. On that beach the meal is not a warm up for the real thing; it is the first real thing, and it does its own work, and by the time anybody speaks the atmosphere has already changed because seven men have eaten fish that somebody else cooked for them.

You have never had only one way into your own house. John 21:9 has the fire lit before a word is exchanged, and the Holy Spirit who preserved that detail put an action in front of every conversation in the chapter; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) is not waiting on a man to find a second sentence.

This is yours right now, on a porch with a pan going: a way in that does not require you to say anything. John 21:12 is four words and a fire, and the Spirit who preserved that scene made the food part of the reconciliation rather than a delay before it.

He was already doing it

Let me point at something he has not noticed, because it is happening while he reads this.

There is a fire in the pit because the youngest asked. He is doing the pan. Four people are on a porch on a Saturday evening because he made a fire.

That is John 21. That is exactly and precisely what is in that chapter: somebody who is not saying the thing yet, cooking, and a group of people gathering around the heat because he did.

He has been waiting for eighteen months to be able to start, and he has been starting, on and off, all year, without recognizing it.

You were already doing the first thing, and you had it filed under not enough. John 21:9 makes the fire and the fish the opening move; the Holy Spirit who preserved that chapter did not describe the cooking as a preliminary.

Fruit is not output, and a house where everything is fine is where the difference is sharpest. Output is the conversation: dateable, describable, and currently absent. Fruit is what grows on a porch over a fire nobody has to explain, and John 15:4 says the branch cannot bear fruit of itself, with or without the second sentence.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. Out here while the pan does what it does, tell Him one true thing about the eighteen months with nothing asked for and no words requested. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody transcribes that.