A Table in Front of the Trouble

The shop went in February and the people who tell him to count his blessings all still have theirs.

That is the sentence he has not said out loud, and it is the whole of his winter in one line.

Nineteen years of that shop. His father's before it, though the trade changed twice and it is not the same business in any real sense. He is not romantic about it; it was a hard way to make a living and the last four years were a slow argument with an economy that had stopped needing what he sold.

But it went, in February, in a week, and the way a thing goes matters as much as the going.

And since then people have been kind at him. Not cruel. Kind in the specific way that costs the speaker nothing, which is the kind that arrives as advice.

Count your blessings. You have your health. At least you have your family. It could be worse.

And each one of those is true, and every one of them is said by somebody who did not carry out a chair and a till and a picture of his father from a shop that had been open for two generations, on a Tuesday, in the rain, while a man from the letting agent waited by his car.

He nods. He says thank you. And something in him goes further underground every time.

The table is set in front of the trouble, not instead of it

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over (Psalm 23:5).

Look carefully at where the table is.

Not after the enemies have gone. Not somewhere else, in a safer valley, once the situation has resolved. In their presence. They are still there, still visible, still in the room, and a table is being laid in front of the man while they watch.

That is not a promise that the trouble is over. It is a picture of provision arriving in the middle of unresolved trouble, with the trouble fully in view and not explained away.

You are being fed in the presence of a thing that has not gone. That is the exact staging of the verse, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an ancient picture real at a man's own table, because Scripture says He is the Comforter, which is presence inside a thing and not the removal of it.

Count your blessings is not in the Bible

Let me be plain about the advice, because it is doing damage and nobody has told you that it is not a verse.

Count your blessings is a hymn line and a good one, and it is not an instruction God gives to a man in February. Scripture never once approaches a person in loss and asks them to produce gratitude as evidence of good character. Job's friends did approximately that and the book of Job exists partly to say what God thought of it.

What Scripture does with loss is much stranger and much better. It names it. There is a whole book of Lamentations. There are psalms that end badly. There is a God who does not require a person to describe their disaster as a blessing before He will lay a table in front of them.

You are not required to call February good in order to be provided for. The word never asks a person in loss for gratitude as a qualification, and it is the Holy Spirit who provides in the middle of a hard thing without requiring an explanation of it first.

A cup that runs over, in front of the enemies

Now, the thing about the last clause of that verse is the excess in it.

My cup runneth over. Not: my cup is adequate. Not: I have enough to keep going. Running over, which is more than necessary, in front of people who are watching, while the situation is unresolved.

That is a specific kind of provision and it is deliberately public. It is God laying on more than is needed, in the middle of a bad season, in view of everything that is still wrong.

So the promise is not that February is reinterpreted. The promise is that a table gets laid in a room where the trouble is still standing, and that what is on it is more than survival rations.

You have a table laid in front of you and it is not laid in exchange for gratitude about the loss. Scripture puts the table and the enemies in one sentence and does not resolve either into the other, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a table real at a man's own house rather than a metaphor in a psalm.

And I will not oversell it, because you have had enough of that since February. Nothing here promises another shop, and nothing here says the nineteen years were secretly building to something. I do not know why February happened and neither does anybody who has advised you. What is settled is where the table is set, and it is set in the room where the thing you lost still shows.