The Table I Long For
Reflections from a soul-wearied life
Photo credit: Me
(A seven-minute read.)
Two days ago, my wife and I gave away our kitchen table, which we’ve basically had for our whole marriage.
A little while later, I was reflecting on how that act was a bit of a metaphor for where I am emotionally right now.
As I hinted at a few weeks ago, which elicited a number of concerned responses, we’re actually about to move. After living in the same house for over 12 years, our landlord is selling our house and we have to find somewhere else to live in the Bangor area.
The timing of the sell is really awful because we were already planning on making a big move in another year anyway—either finally buying our own place in Bangor, or making a bigger move somewhere else because of our children’s educational needs.
So we’re faced with the reality that, after living in the same house for over 12 years—which is basically the only place my kids have ever known (our oldest was 20 months when we moved here)—we’re going to be moving twice in the span of about 12 months.
Of course, as a very sentimental guy, I’m quite torn up about all this. There are so many memories in this house and neighborhood—babies’ first steps, games of basketball and tag with my kids, dinners hosted, neighbors served—which makes me feel like a part of me is dying.
Then there’s the long-term uncertainty. I’ve been quite open with my congregation about the possibility of us moving altogether in another year (that’s the type of community our congregation fosters—where even the pastor can be open about his stresses), which creates all sorts of sadness.
We’ve been here for over 12 years, which is not all that common for my line of work in my particular denomination, and it’s been an amazing journey. This is especially true for the last seven years—after we began the process of “replanting” the congregation to align more with the values of community and missional living.
Honestly, I get to serve the best congregation on the planet, and I’ve been able to sit at the most welcoming and loving “table” one could find (we’re not at all perfect, but we’ve been slowly headed in that direction). We’ve put in so much work to help foster such an environment, as well as with the elementary school our church runs (and my wife is principal of), which has experienced exciting growth over the last few years.
This is not even to mention the many relationships we’ve formed outside our congregation, which are perhaps even more important to me than what we’ve experienced inside our congregation, and the impact we’ve tried to make on our neighborhood and city.
It feels like a job that is significantly incomplete, and I’m not ready to give up on it.
All these realities have converged to produce a sort of “spiritual depression” in my life, causing me to feel soul-weary and directionless. I feel aimless, not quite sure how to make sense of my life and what my purpose really is.
Indeed, I feel like someone without a table.
When you’ve gone very hard in one direction for nearly 20% of your life, and suddenly you’re not sure if you’re going to keep going in that direction (having not arrived at your destination), it’s very disorienting.
Coupled with all the memories I’ve made in this house with my wife and children, it makes for a strange spiritual and emotional concoction.
What’s more, this past Friday, as I was flying back from Minnesota, I watched the movie Jesus Revolution, which loosely follows the true story of the “Jesus movement” that took place among hippies in the 1960s and 70s. I know there’s more to the story than the film portrayed, and life is never as simple and beautiful as it looks on the screen, but the story left me with an infinitely-deep longing to experience the loving, Jesus-centered community the movie pointed to.
And that is, at the end of the day, what my heart truly yearns for.
The table is the metaphor—but it’s also the substance of human existence. I believe we were created to love and to be loved. We were created to be in eternal fellowship—loving, accepting, delighting, joyous fellowship—with one another and ultimately with the triune God. We were created to sit at the table together—eating, celebrating, rejoicing.
It’s why Jesus so often compared the “kingdom of God” to a feast, or why he was so frequently at the table throughout the Gospel records, and why the book of Revelation, when talking about Christ’s return, speaks of it as the “marriage supper of the Lamb” (Revelation 19:9).
And yet all tables in this life are temporary, fleeting, and momentary. They can’t ultimately deliver everything for which our hearts yearn. They can merely point to a grander reality, a better and bigger and eternal table that will never end.
All this makes me think of a classic thought from C. S. Lewis:
Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
He then continues:
Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing. If that is so, I must take care, on the one hand, never to despise, or be unthankful for, these earthly blessings, and on the other, never to mistake them for the something else of which they are only a kind of copy, or echo, or mirage. I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find until after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others do the same.
Until we get to that eternal table, we recognize the incompleteness of our tables here. We celebrate them, but we long for an even better one to come.
The gift of table fellowship
My wife and I put our kitchen table out by the road on Sunday, put a “free” sign on it, and trusted someone would pick it up (as always happens when we put free stuff by the road).
Within a few minutes, my wife came in to the house and asked me if I heard who took the table.
It was one of our neighbors, just down the road, for whom my son mows the lawn. They recently started fostering two children, and need a bigger table to accommodate their growing family.
It struck me as ironic again—a fitting metaphor for our journey in this neighborhood and in our city. It may not seem like a big deal—a very humble act—to provide your neighbors with a free table. But it seems to be a reflection of what we’ve tried to do over the last seven or eight years: simply trying to bless and serve others, not knowing if or how it might bear fruit.
It’s been an act of faith, as we’ve largely engaged, in the words of Henri Nouwen, in “loving without expecting to be loved in return, giving without wanting to receive, inviting without hoping to be invited, holding without asking to be held.”
We don’t know if our labors will have truly touched anyone to any significant degree—either temporally or eternally—but we’ve continuously invited people to our table and now given that table away in an act of blessing to others.
In the grand scheme of things it may not seem like much. But as we long for another table—both literally and metaphorically—I hope and trust that our simple acts of kindness can have a ripple effect, moving out toward many others, perhaps with eternal consequence.
Until then, we long for that never-ending table.
Two Postscripts: In the event that any readers don’t already realize it, the title of this post was actually the same as my most recent book, The Table I Long For, which details our journey over the last seven years of pursuing a life of community, mission, and blessing in our neighborhood and city, and the replanting of our church to journey down the same path as well.
Secondly, check out this beautiful, beautiful song “Come to the Table,” which a friend introduced me to a few years ago. It’s such a powerful and wonderful picture of what I long for—both temporally and eternally.
Shawn is a pastor in Maine, whose life, ministry, and writing focus on incarnational expressions of faith. The author of four books and a columnist for Adventist Review, he is also a DPhil (PhD) student at the University of Oxford, focusing on nineteenth-century American Christianity. You can follow him on Instagram, and listen to his podcast Mission Lab.
Shawn, regarding your comment "there are so many memories in this house and neighborhood", I went through a similar loss to what you describe recently when my childhood home was sold after 55 years. That home, even though I hadn't lived in it for 30 years, was like an anchor where family was always welcome and always a place to 'go back to'. When my mum sold that house, it seemed like I was somehow set adrift, an orphan, with no place to call home. Those feelings (and especially the intensity of them) were quite profound and largely unexpected.
When we recently downsized into a much smaller living space ourselves, we gave away a lot of our furniture including our dining table, countless books, clothes, etc. As we found recipients for those things, and the sadness that accompanied giving them away, I came to realise that we only ever held those things 'in trust' until someone else could be blessed by them. Maybe the metaphor of the table is something similar - it was in the giving away that it was most valuable because it blessed someone else.
My heart felt what you wrote... praying for you and your family and all that is connected. God bless you.