The Meals I Set Out for Strangers

The door is on the street and it has never been locked in the daytime in thirty years, which his wife thought was madness for the first four and then stopped mentioning.

The arrangement is simple and it was his father's. If somebody comes to the door at a mealtime, they eat. There is no conversation about it. You do not ask where they are from, you do not ask what they need, and you never, ever ask what happened, because a man who is eating at a stranger's table has already told you everything by being there.

Thirty years of that. He has fed, at a guess, several hundred people. He knows the names of maybe forty of them.

He is sixty. And tonight the courtyard is full because it is a Thursday and it is always fullish on a Thursday, and he is at the head of the table with the vine over him and the lanterns going and he has just noticed something that has been creeping up on him for about two years and finally arrived.

He does not know whether any of it did anything.

Not spiritually. He is not asking whether God noticed. He means: those several hundred people got up from this table and walked back out onto that street, and he has no idea what happened to a single one of them. Not one. There is not one person, in thirty years, who has come back and said anything, and he has stopped expecting it, and the stopping is what worries him, because a man who has stopped expecting anything is a short distance from a man who wonders why he bothers.

He would never say it out loud at this table. He has not said it to his wife. He said one sentence of it to his brother two years ago and his brother said something warm and useless and the subject changed.

Somebody is tearing bread at the far end and there is that noise a table makes when nine people talk at once. And a man of sixty is sitting under his own vine adding up thirty years and finding no column that will take the numbers.

You have that door. It might not be a door. It might be a phone that rings, a spare room, a car you keep lending, a bank account people know about. And you have done it for years and nobody has ever come back and told you, and you have started to wonder. There is a passage where Jesus talks about exactly this, and the strange thing about it is that He does not treat the silence as a problem. He treats it as the design.

The secret is the instruction, not the loss

I have to be careful here, because there is a version of this that sends him looking. Track a few of them down. Ask. Find out what it did. I am not going to say it, and not because it is dangerous, but because it makes a stranger's memory the thing his peace rests on, and it turns thirty years of open door into a survey.

Jesus says, about giving: But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly (Matthew 6:3-4).

Read the first half again. Let not your left hand know. That is not modesty, that is a picture of somebody so uninterested in the record that even the other side of his own body is not informed. Jesus is not asking a man to be humble about his accounts. He is asking him not to keep any.

You have been doing it right, and the not knowing is what right looks like. That is not me making a virtue out of his frustration; Matthew 6:4 puts the seeing on the Father's side and the secret inside the instruction, and the Holy Spirit who carried that into the Gospel made the silence part of the design rather than an unfortunate side effect.

And notice who does the seeing. Thy Father which seeth in secret. There is no gap in the record. Every one of the several hundred was watched by somebody. The absence is not an absence of witnesses; it is an absence of reports to him, which is a different thing entirely and a much smaller one.

But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth: that thine alms may be in secret: and thy Father which seeth in secret himself shall reward thee openly.Matthew 6:3-4

Why a man stops expecting

Now the thing that has actually been happening for two years.

He has not become bitter. That is not what this is. What has happened is quieter: he has moved from doing it because that is what a table is for, to doing it while privately wondering, and the wondering has started to sit in the room with him like a fourth person at a table for three.

You have never been feeding an empty street. Hebrews 13:2 says be not forgetful to entertain strangers, for thereby some have entertained angels unawares, and unawares is the whole point of the sentence; the same Spirit who bears witness that you are His (Romans 8:16) has been at this table on nights that felt like nothing at all.

This is yours right now, at the head of your own table: a record kept somewhere that was never going to be read out to you. Matthew 25:37 has the righteous genuinely not knowing what they did, asking Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, and they are not being modest, they do not know; the Spirit who preserved that scene put the not knowing in the mouths of the ones being commended.

What is actually under the wondering

Let me name the sentence, because it is not resentment and it is not tiredness.

It sounds like this: if none of it did anything, then thirty years of this was a habit and not a life, and I would not know how to look at my own table. That is the fear, and a man says one sentence of it to his brother and then never again.

You were building something in every one of those evenings and it left by the street door. John 15:5 says the branch that abides bears much fruit and it never once says the branch is shown the harvest; the Holy Spirit does the growing and He carries it out into the people it grew for, which is exactly why it cannot be found in the courtyard.

Fruit is not output, and an open door is where the difference is clearest. Output would be a list: names, dates, outcomes, a column that adds up. Fruit is what grew on a man who left a door unlocked for thirty years and asked nobody where they were from, and Galatians 5:22 calls part of that goodness and part of it gentleness, and there was never going to be a way to count it.

So what does staying attached look like this week, since nobody is getting a program from me. One thing. In the ten minutes before the lanterns go out, tell Him about one evening from those thirty years with no question attached to it at all. One face. One plate. Then be quiet long enough for Him to have the last word. Nobody tallies that.