We met at the community table
A few weeks back, our youngest son came to visit for the weekend before my wife’s birthday. On Sunday, after church, we decided to go out to eat. We were all craving breakfast food, and we eventually ended up at First Watch. We had been there a couple of times before, and the food is excellent. But as we walked up, I groaned. They were obviously very busy, and there were people waiting outside for a table. I really wasn’t in the mood to wait for what looked like at least an hour, but we went up to their reception desk to ask anyway.
The place was packed. Waiters and waitresses zooming around everywhere. “Yeah, it’s going to be a while,” the reception lady told us. Then her face changed, like she got an idea. After looking back over her right shoulder, she asked us, “You only have three people, right?” “Yes,” I said. What she offered next completely caught me off guard. “Well, you could take a seat at our community table. There are three seats open there.”
I had no idea what a community table at a restaurant entailed, but I was happy to grab a seat and get some food. She led us back to a long, tall table with four tall chairs on either side. There were two women facing each other at one end and a family of three at the other. Just enough room for my wife and me to sit across from our son.
We were completely surrounded by strangers; close enough to bump elbows and have to shift drinks and plates around so everyone could manage their food. Everyone politely smiled, saying hellos and good mornings. The waitress brought us menus, and as we scoped out what we wanted, we realized that our new neighbors had already ordered some of what we were considering. That right there started multiple conversations about recommendations and personal favorites. From that point on, you would have had no idea that the people sitting around the community table didn’t know each other just an hour ago. Sometimes the conversation involved everyone, other times three different discussions were happening at once. We talked about colleges (our son and the family’s daughter were going to different local universities), travel (the father was from Italy), career choices (the lady to my wife’s left was in the army, the mother to my right had held a variety of interesting occupations), and sports (football vs futbol)…anything that helped tell the story of how we all ended up a community table, eating breakfast for lunch on a Sunday in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Everyone else at the table finished before we did, and we ended up leaving before anyone else came to the community table. We left with stunned smiles on our faces, wondering exactly what we had just unexpectedly experienced. We couldn’t quite wrap words around it, but we all agreed – that was cool.
Experiences like this make me think that I got a glimmer of what heaven is going to be like. There are going to be scores of people we’ve never met – each with a life story of how they ended up there. The tie that will bind all of us together will be that we believed in Jesus for eternal life (John 3:16), but how we came to that point and how God worked in our lives will be fascinating.
The same John that recorded John 3:16 was later given a vision – a revelation – of what the future of humanity will be like. When thinking of our community table breakfast, one of things John saw comes to mind:
Revelation 7:9
After this I looked, and there was a vast multitude from every nation, tribe, people, and language, which no one could number, standing before the throne and before the Lamb.
What a sight that will be! I can’t wait to see it…and I’m also looking forward to eating at that community table!
Keep Pressing,
Ken