He Wrecked the Potluck Tablecloth and Everybody Laughed

The potluck is in the hall behind the church and the tables are trestle tables put end to end so they make one long one, and there is a cloth that goes the whole length of it. One cloth. It is a big cloth and somebody's grandmother made it and Deacon Wattles is in charge of it, and if you want to understand this story that is the only fact you need.

Bucky was not supposed to be there. Bucky is never supposed to be anywhere, and he was in the truck, and I want to be honest and say that I am the one who left the tailgate the way I left it.

He came in the side door during the prayer. He went under the table, which is the natural place for a goat because that is where the crumbs are, and he got the hem of the cloth in his teeth somewhere around the potato salad, and then he walked.

He walked the whole length of the table. All of it. End to end, at a steady pace, like a man delivering something.

I have thought about that afternoon a great deal and what I keep coming back to is that nobody screamed. There was about one full second of complete silence and then Mrs. Ames laughed, and once Mrs. Ames laughs the room is gone, and it was gone for a long time. My dad was holding the edge of a table with both hands and his shoulders were going and he was not making any noise at all, which is his way.

Deacon Wattles inflated. He inflated for twenty minutes. He had things to say about respect and about the hall and about whose grandmother made that cloth, and he said all of them, and he was not entirely wrong about any of it, and I want to be fair to him because he is the one who washes that cloth.

Here is the thing though. That was four years ago. And people still tell it. They tell it at every single potluck, and they tell it to people who were not there, and the ones who were there interrupt each other to get the details right. It is the best thing that has ever happened in that hall.

And I was the one who left the tailgate, and I have never once been the villain of the story when it gets told.

What God picks up on purpose

Paul writes a list, and every item on it is a thing that would not be chosen by anybody organizing anything.

But God hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise; and God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; And base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are. (1 Corinthians 1:27, 28)

Read the last item slowly, because it is the strangest one. Things which are not. Not weak things. Not small things. Things that do not even register as things.

And the verb attached to every single item is the same verb. Chosen. Not tolerated, not accommodated, not worked around. Chosen, which is a word about deliberate preference.

You are not on a list of what God settled for. 1 Corinthians 1:28 uses the language of choosing four separate times in two verses, and it is His Spirit who makes that read as being wanted rather than as being consoled.

The reason is given one verse later and it removes any possibility that this is God being kind about a shortage: that no flesh should glory in his presence. The choosing is strategic. If the impressive one had done it, everybody would have known exactly who to thank.

You have been chosen in the exact way God has always chosen, and it was never a second round. That is written down in 1 Corinthians 1 and it is not an inference, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves it from a fact on a page into a chest that has been carrying something for four years.

The stone the builders threw out

There is a line in the Psalms that Jesus quotes about Himself, and it is a building story.

The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. (Psalm 118:22)

Builders refuse stones. That is a real job and it involves a real pile. A stone gets looked at, and it is the wrong shape or it has a fault in it or it will not sit square, and it goes on the pile with the others that will not do.

The head stone of the corner is the one that sets the angle for the whole building. Every other stone is laid against it. It is not a decorative stone and it is not a consolation position, it is the one that decides whether the walls are true.

So the psalm is describing a stone that went from the refuse pile to the single most load bearing position on the site, and the writer adds, almost cheerfully, that this is the Lord's doing and it is marvelous in the eyes of everybody watching.

You are not permanently filed by the worst afternoon somebody had with you. Psalm 118:22 moves a stone from a pile to a corner in one sentence, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a thing a person can stand on rather than admire.

You have never been outside what God is willing to build with. The written word puts the refused stone at the corner rather than in a garden, and His Spirit is what makes the difference between reading that and believing it about yourself.