The Sunday Letter
Nobody stays a stranger down here for longer than it takes to get them fed.
Last Sunday I told you about the new students landing in the South for the first time, and how fast this place reaches out and pulls them in. This week I got to be part of the pulling.
The plan was not complicated. Buy a pile of pizza. Set out the lemonade. Throw in a few veggie trays for some semblance of healthy. Then open the doors and see who comes. We did it more than once over the course of the week, and by the time it was all done, we had fed a few hundred students, one paper plate at a time.
Nothing about it was fancy, and that was the whole point. Because there is something that happens when you put food in front of young people who are a long way from home and still feeling it. They come. They sit down next to somebody they have never met. They eat. And somewhere between the first slice and the last cup of lemonade, they are not strangers anymore. Nobody planned that part. Nobody had to.
The South has a lot of languages. The front porch is one. Yes ma’am and no sir is another, and so is waving at trucks you do not recognize. But the mother tongue, the first language every one of us learned before we could talk, is food. We say welcome with a casserole. We say I am sorry with a ham on the doorstep. We say I am glad you are my neighbor with a paper sack of tomatoes, and we say stay a while by putting on another pot of coffee. There is no class where anybody teaches this. You pick it up the way you pick up an accent, by growing up inside of it.
And the table is about to get busy down here. The last Sunday of August is a kind of doorway: on the other side of it wait the tailgates and the church suppers, the covered-dish homecomings, the fair food you regret in the best way, the long slow march of good eating that carries the South from Labor Day clear to Thanksgiving. We eat our way into every season we have. It is one of my favorite things about us.
But I want to tell you what I kept coming back to, watching those students fill up paper plates. The food was never really the point. The food is the door. What waits on the other side is the thing every one of them was actually hungry for: somebody looking them in the eye, asking where they were from, and staying put for the answer. The plate is the excuse. The table is the reason.
So here is my small assignment for the week, if you will have it. Feed somebody. It does not need to be fancy, and it does not need to be Sunday dinner. A pot of something. A pizza and a jug of lemonade. A store-bought pie you refuse to apologize for. One extra chair pulled up to whatever you were fixing anyway. Ask somebody to your table this week, and pay attention to what gets served that you did not cook.
Take a minute with that today. Then go set a place.
That’s the week. See you next Sunday.
The South, Shared.
Porch Light
A brief Sunday reflection from Blessed South
On a night when company is coming, the porch light goes on early at our house. It is the first thing that happens, before the table is set, while the pots are still going. The light over the door says the thing the cook is too busy to say. You are expected here. Come on in when you get here.
I have been thinking all week about tables, and about why eating together does something to people that almost nothing else can do. It turns out Scripture has known it all along. When the church was brand new, only weeks old, with no buildings and no budgets and everything still ahead of it, here is what those first believers actually did:
“And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favor with all the people.” — Acts 2:46-47
Day by day. In their homes. Not a program, not a committee, not an event with a signup sheet. Suppers. The church got its start at kitchen tables, over ordinary food, passed between people with glad and generous hearts. Two thousand years on, I am convinced most of the real work still happens there.
And when Jesus wanted to give us a picture of what it looks like when He enters a life, He did not describe a throne room or a courtroom. He described a door, a knock, and a meal.
“Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.” — Revelation 3:20
Eat with him. Of everything the Lord of heaven might have promised, He promised supper. I do not believe that is an accident. A shared meal is the one place left where being together is the whole agenda, where nobody is performing and nobody is in line for anything except seconds. He knew what He was offering. He knows what we are hungry for.
I will tell you the truth about my own table. Too many nights, supper is a plate carried to wherever the screen is, eaten in ten minutes with just a brief word of thanks over it, and only Misti across from me. I have treated more meals as fuel than as fellowship, and I expect I have missed more than I will ever know that way.
So maybe the invitation this week is a simple one, for both of us. Set one more place than you need. Turn the porch light on early, so somebody knows they are expected. And when you hear that knock at your own door, the quiet one that has been sounding your whole life, remember that the One knocking is not asking you to clean up first. He is asking to come in and eat with you. The supper is His idea, the door opens from your side, and the light over it has been burning longer than any of us has been alive. It is on tonight, and it is on for you.
And if this brought you something today, share it with someone who’d enjoy it too.