Breakfast On The Shore

It cost her whole weekend. Her daughter's birthday was in it.

That is the sentence, and it is accurate, and it is the reason this is not going away. It was not an abstract cost and it did not land on a company. It landed on one specific person, in a specific house, on a specific Saturday, and the reason it landed there was a thing she did on Friday afternoon.

She apologized. It was received. The woman was gracious about it in a way that made everything worse.

And now she cannot look at her.

She can talk to her. She does talk to her, every day, perfectly normally, about work. What she cannot do is meet her eye for longer than about a second, and she has become skilled at arranging that, and she thinks nobody has noticed and she is probably wrong.

What she is avoiding, if she made herself say it, is not anger. There is no anger to avoid. It is kindness. She cannot bear to be looked at kindly by somebody whose Saturday she took.

So she keeps it short. Cheerful and short, for four months.

You may know that avoidance. Not somebody you are afraid of. Somebody who was good to you afterwards, and whose kindness is the exact thing you cannot stand in the room.

He made them breakfast first

Here is a scene, and the order of events in it is the entire message.

Peter had failed publicly and badly. Three times, out loud, in front of people, at the worst possible moment. And now he is back at his old work on a lake, and a man on the shore calls out, and he swims for it.

And here is what is waiting.

As soon then as they were come to land, they saw a fire of coals there, and fish laid thereon, and bread. Jesus saith unto them, Come and dine.John 21:9,12

A fire already lit. Fish already on it. Bread.

Nothing is said about the failure. Not one word, not yet. There is a conversation later, further along the beach, and it is a real one and it matters. But it does not come first.

What comes first is breakfast.

You are met with something to eat before anything is discussed, and that was the order Christ chose. John 21 lays the fire and puts the bread out before a word is said about what happened, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that order into a woman who has been bracing for four months.

Now let me name what you are actually avoiding, because you had it right.

It is the kindness. Anger you could have handled: you would have taken it, you would have deserved some of it, and it would have been over. Kindness leaves you with nothing to do. There is no way to work it off, and so being looked at kindly feels like a debt increasing rather than a debt cleared.

That is the thing that has kept your eyes down for four months, and it is not pride and it is not weakness. It is what happens to an honest person who cannot find a way to settle an account.

You are being given something you cannot work off, and that is what makes it a gift rather than a transaction. The written word puts the meal before the conversation on a shore where the worst failure in the room was the one being fed, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person receive without settling up.

The honest half. Her Saturday is gone and her daughter's birthday happened without her and none of that comes back. I am not going to tell you it was small.

And I am not going to tell you God set it up so you would learn something. He did not arrange her weekend as a teaching aid.

There is a part only you can do, and it is deliberately physical and slightly odd. You eat something, slowly, on purpose, before the day starts. Because you have spent four months being unable to receive anything, and receiving is a thing the body can practice before the heart catches up.