The Place I Still Set

You do it while the others are still bringing things through, so that nobody sees you do it, and everybody sees it done.

The plate at the end. The glass. The napkin folded the way your mother folded them, which is the way he used to complain about.

Two years.

He is alive. That is the first thing to say, because people assume otherwise when they hear a chair described. He is alive, he is in the same country, and he answers his sister sometimes, which is how anybody knows anything.

He is not coming on Sunday. He did not come last Sunday and he has not come on a hundred Sundays, and you set the place anyway, every week, and you have never once explained why to anybody at that table.

Your wife asked you last month. Gently. She waited until the others were out in the yard and she asked whether you might stop setting it, because of what it does to his sister, who looks at it every week and says nothing.

You said you would think about it. You have thought about very little else.

And what you have not been able to work out, in four weeks of thinking, is whether that empty place is hope or whether it has quietly become a monument.

The father in the parable was watching before there was anything to see

There is a detail in the story Jesus told that almost everybody reads past.

And he arose, and came to his father. But when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, and had compassion, and ran, and fell on his neck, and kissed him.Luke 15:20

When he was yet a great way off, his father saw him.

For the father to see him at that distance, the father was already looking. Not once. Not that afternoon. A man does not spot a figure on the far edge of a road unless watching that road is a thing he does.

Jesus does not describe the watching. He implies it, and the implication carries years in it.

And notice what the father does not do in that story. He does not go and fetch him. He does not send anybody. He does not command him home. The whole of what the father does before the running is watch a road.

You have been doing the one thing that father did. I am not putting my own opinion over you here. Scripture says when he was yet a great way off, his father saw him, Luke 15:20, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a man watching a road for two years without turning it into a demand.

What I cannot tell you

I want to be plain, because this is a page about somebody's son.

I cannot tell you he comes back. That is not mine to say, it is not in anybody's gift, and the parable is a picture of God's welcome and not a guarantee about a particular Sunday in a particular family.

And nothing on this page will command your son's will. Not a declaration, not a song, not a line of prayer. He is a grown man with his own account before God and his own road, and love does not get authority over another person because it is love.

What is settled is smaller and truer. You are held in this, and so is he. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, Psalm 145:18, and the Holy Spirit is as present on whatever road your son is on as He is at your table on a Sunday.

Your wife is not asking you to give up

Now the thing that has cost you four weeks.

She did not ask you to stop hoping. She asked you to stop setting a plate, and those are not the same, and the last four weeks of thinking have quietly merged them.

She is his mother. She is not the one who has given up in this house. She is watching her daughter look at an empty place every week and say nothing, and she is trying to protect the child who is in the room.

That is not a smaller love than yours. It is the same love, arriving at a different practical conclusion about a plate.

You have not been asked to choose between hearing her and hoping. Scripture says be kindly affectioned one to another with brotherly love, in honor preferring one another, Romans 12:10, and the Holy Spirit does not require a father to be right about crockery at the cost of his wife.

And the daughter who says nothing

Here is the part I would sit with longest.

Your daughter looks at that chair every week. She has never said a word about it, which in a family usually means she has a great deal to say and nowhere she feels she can say it.

There is a version of a set place that says: this family is still open. There is another version that says: the person who is missing is the important one at this table.

You did not intend the second. Children are not good at telling the difference, and neither are most adults.

You could ask her. Not at the table. You are free to ask, and free to change the shape of this, without any of it being a surrender. Scripture says provoke not your children, but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord, Ephesians 6:4, and the Holy Spirit does not tie a father's faithfulness to a piece of crockery.