The Sunday Dinner She Cooks Alone

Loretta puts the roast in at eleven fifteen, the way she has since she was twenty-six years old.

It is a full dinner. It is not a small thing she makes for herself and calls dinner. It is the roast, six potatoes, the greens with the smoked turkey wing in them the way her mother taught her, a pan of cornbread, and the peach thing she makes with the canned peaches because that is what people ask for. It takes four hours and it fills a house of that size completely, so that by one o'clock the whole place smells like a family lives in it.

Then she sets the table.

She sets one place. She used to set more. There was a run of years when she set six and put the extra plates away afterward without saying anything about it, washing dishes nobody had eaten off, and one January she stopped doing that because it had started to feel like something a person does in a sad movie. So now it is one place, at the corner nearest the kitchen, with the napkin folded because you fold the napkin.

But the food is still for six. That has never changed and she has never once let it change. And if you asked her why, on a good day, she would laugh at herself and say she cannot cook small. On another day she might tell you the truth, which is two words long.

In case.

In case somebody is passing through. In case a car pulls in. In case her son is in the state after all and thinks of it, or her daughter calls at noon and says we are forty minutes away. It has not happened in a very long time. Loretta is sixty-three and she is not confused about the odds and she does not sit by the window. She simply refuses, week after week, to cook a meal that could not feed the people she loves if they walked in the door.

I want to be careful here, because that woman is not pathetic and this is not a sad story about a foolish woman. There is something in that pot that is closer to faithfulness than to delusion. But there is also an ache in it that she carries every single Sunday between one o'clock and about two thirty, when the house is full of the smell of a family and contains one person, and she eats at the corner nearest the kitchen and does not put the radio on.

You know that hour. Maybe you do not cook. Maybe yours is the second bedroom you have not changed, or the group photo still on the hallway wall, or the way you keep your Saturday clear for a phone call that stopped coming in a year you could name. And underneath it, worn smooth from handling, is the conclusion you made a long time ago and stopped arguing about: they made it clear, and I am not wanted. So before one word of teaching, let me say what is actually true. You are wanted by God, and the wanting was settled before anybody in your family made up their mind. Matthew 12:50 is the record of a day when Jesus looked around a crowded room and named His own family out loud, and the Spirit has been putting you inside that sentence every Sunday you have set that table.

He named a family out loud, in a room, with people watching

Let me tell you what is actually happening in the passage under this message, because most people know the verse and very few have sat in the scene.

Jesus is teaching in a house. It is packed. Word comes in from the edge of the crowd that His mother and His brothers are outside asking for Him. And instead of going out, He does something that would have landed on that room like a dropped pan. He looks around at the people sitting in front of Him, and He says this.

For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.Matthew 12:50

Hear the verbs. Is. Not could be, not is like, not may one day be counted as. Is. He is not comparing anybody to family. He is naming a family, in public, out loud, and He is doing it in the same room where His own relatives are standing outside asking after Him.

And notice who He does not do. He does not prosecute the people outside. He does not explain them, excuse them, condemn them, or predict what they are going to do next. He simply speaks, and the speaking creates the standing, and nothing about the people at the door has any bearing on it at all.

You have a family named over you by the mouth of Jesus, and it did not require anybody's agreement. It is written in Matthew 12:50 that whoever does the will of His Father is His brother and sister and mother, and the Spirit does not read that verse to you as a consolation for something you lost.

Not a substitute, and not a smaller portion

Now I have to say the thing that most needs saying on a page like this one, and I am going to say it plainly and only once, so it does not get buried.

Being wanted by God is not compensation.

It is not a replacement for the son who does not come. It is not a smaller portion set aside for the people nobody chose. It is not God stepping in to fill a chair, and I will not offer it to you that way, because if I did you would receive it as second best for the rest of your life and it is not second best. It came first. It was true about you before your first Sunday alone and it would have been just as true if that driveway had been full of cars every week since 1989.

That is the whole point of the order. He wanted you before there was any absence to make up for.

You are wanted in the first order and never out of what was left over, and that order is God's own doing. 1 John 4:10 puts it beyond argument, that herein is love, not that we loved God but that He loved us, and the Spirit refuses to reverse that sentence however many Sundays have gone by.

I am also not going to tell you what to do about your family, and you will not find that instruction anywhere in this message. Not a phone call, not a letter, not a timetable for forgiving anybody, not a prediction that they are going to come around. Some of you are carrying decisions that took you years to make, and they are yours, and God is well able to lead you in them without me handing you an assignment from a distance.

What I will do is put the naming back where Scripture puts it. Human beings can decline you. They can decline you for decades, for reasons you may never learn. What no human being on this earth has ever been able to do is settle whose you are, because that word does not belong to them and it never has. You were wanted first, and no absence since has revised it. Psalm 68:6 says God sets the solitary in families, and the Spirit keeps that verb in the present tense over a kitchen that smells like Sunday.