Never Asked Back

He has eaten at a great many tables and he is welcome at all of them.

That has to be said first because otherwise the rest of this reads as self pity, and it is not. He is genuinely welcome. People are pleased to see him. He has been fed generously in perhaps forty houses over twenty years and not one of those welcomes has been false.

He is forty three.

And here is the thing he noticed at some point in his thirties and has never mentioned to a living soul.

Nobody has ever asked him back.

Not once. He gets asked. He goes. It is warm and the food is good and there is laughing, and he helps clear, and he leaves at a reasonable hour and thanks them properly.

And that is the end of it. There is no second invitation from that house that comes because of the first one. The next time he goes anywhere it is because a different person has thought of him for a different reason, and the cycle runs again.

He is a good guest. He has become an extremely good guest. He knows what to bring, he knows when to leave, he asks the right questions of the quiet one at the end of the table, and he does not overstay.

Being an excellent guest is the skill of a man who has never been anything else.

There was a moment in March in somebody's courtyard, with a table being laid, and the host said the ordinary thing, come again, and he said the ordinary thing back, and he walked to the car knowing with total certainty that he would not be asked again and that nobody in that house had lied to him.

You know the count. Yours may be in different rooms. But you know what it is to be welcome everywhere and belong nowhere, and to have got so good at the first that nobody has ever suspected you have not got the second.

The wings are a place, not a lent room

Let me name the pit before we go to the verse, because if this becomes an article about hospitality it will be a nice article and it will not touch you.

You are somewhere you came to, and you were described that way while you were still at the edge of somebody else's field. Ruth 2:12 uses a verb of arrival and not of permission, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a person into what is already true of them.

The pit is not loneliness exactly. You are not short of company; you are at somebody's table most weeks.

The pit is that every welcome you have ever had was a room you were lent for an evening, and you have quietly generalized from forty houses to the whole of the universe, and you have arrived at God with the assumption already made: that His welcome is the same kind, warm and real and lent, and that the question of being asked back does not arise because it never has.

Here is the verse, and notice who says it and about whom.

The Lord recompense thy work, and a full reward be given thee of the Lord God of Israel, under whose wings thou art come to trust.Ruth 2:12

Boaz says this to Ruth, in a field, at the start.

She is a foreigner. She has no claim in that country and everybody in that field knows it, and she is gleaning at the edge, which is what a person does who is being permitted rather than received.

And the sentence Boaz reaches for is not you are welcome here today. It is under whose wings thou art come to trust.

Come to. That is a verb of arrival at a destination, not of being let in for the afternoon. The wings are described as a place a person comes to, and Ruth, who has no standing anywhere, is described as somebody who has come to it.

Nothing in the sentence is on loan.

Take that in the courtyard with the table being laid, and know it is not my kindness, it is what is written. The wings are a place you come to, and a place you come to is not a room you are lent for an evening. Ruth 2:12 puts the refuge on His side and the arriving on hers, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a foreigner at the edge of a field understand what she has actually walked into.

You are somewhere you arrived at, and you were described that way while you were still gleaning at the edge. Ruth 2:12 says thou art come to trust under His wings, and it is the Holy Spirit who brings a person into what is already true of them, and none of that is on loan for an evening.

And here I draw the line this site always draws, in the same breath. God is neither male nor female. Numbers 23:19 says God is not a man, and He is not a woman either; He is spirit. The sheltering wings are one of the ways Scripture describes Him with a mother's picture beside a father's, and both are His own, and it does not make the Spirit a woman and it does not make God a goddess.