At the Kitchen Table

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My pastor said last Sunday that it’s no mistake where we meet Jesus.

I met him at the kitchen table, when I was still small enough to fit on my dad’s lap. He had unlatched and pulled the two halves of the table apart, so there was a gap where the leaves might go. On one half, he’d placed a stuffed, black sheep. Across from it on the other half was a white lamb. I was the black sheep, Jesus was the lamb, and I could see there was no way for one to reach the other without falling to the kitchen floor beneath. That’s when Dad took a wooden cross off the wall and placed it like a bridge over the table gap, and for the first time, I understood.

There was a phrase I’d heard in church growing up that played like a haunting record in my mind. A pastor would say that unbelieving sinners were “on the track to Hell,” and I pictured a coal-black freight train, plummeting into an endless tunnel. I knew I was on that train, and nothing I did could stop it. But that night at the kitchen table, with tears on my face and Dad praying with me, the black train vanished. For the first time, I imagined it had rerouted its course and was now chugging up into the bright clouds. Because of Jesus, and Jesus alone, I knew I was on board.

If it matters where we meet Jesus, then our kitchen table is the station where I boarded. Like the wardrobe or the railway platform in Lewis’s books, it became the threshold into another world for me, so it became a consecrated place.

When Jesus came to dinner with Levi the tax collector and his friends, his table became holy, too. I wonder if it wore the scratches of coins that had been stacked and passed, as Levi parsed and pocketed his own people’s taxes. But that night, the table was given a different purpose, a holy one.

Jesus walked our earth touching people and places the way the priests purified each altar and table in the tabernacle, making ordinary corners holy unto the Lord. So holy ground is wherever Jesus is. With Zaccheaus and Nathaniel, there were holy trees, too. Simon’s fishing boat became holy the day Jesus stepped into it. There were holy wells, holy roadsides, holy riverbanks, and holy homes that became thresholds, where Jesus ushered people into the Kingdom of God on earth.

“As there are no little people in God’s sight, so there are no little places,”{i} wrote Francis Schaeffer. Maybe the question isn’t where we meet Jesus, but where he meets us—the tables and fishing boats and roadsides and riverbanks and trees. If Jesus could meet me at the oak table in my family’s kitchen, maybe he will meet other people in my own kitchen someday. I hope there are holy scratches and open Bibles and kid fingerprints and hot meals, and so discipleship, community, and holy hospitality. In God’s sovereign grace and his grace alone, maybe my table will be the station where my own daughter boards the train to eternal life.

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{i} Schaeffer, Francis. No Little People. (Crossway Books: Wheaton, IL. 1974), 25