Always The Third Saturday

It was always the third Saturday in May, and it was always Ola who made the calls.

She started in on it about the last week of April, sitting at the kitchen wall phone with the long cord and a legal pad, and she went down the list in an order she never wrote down anywhere because she had it in her head. Who was bringing what. Who had a new baby and should not be asked to bring anything but should come anyway. Who had fallen out with whom and needed to be seated at the far end. Forty years of that.

Ola died in November. There was a good service and a good many people, and the family did what families do, and then everybody went back to their own counties.

And nobody made the calls.

Wendell did not think about it much until the second week of May, when he was in the grocery and walked past the ham hocks, and something in him went quiet in a way he did not care for.

So on the third Saturday he got up at seven and made green beans. Her way, which he knew by watching and not by being told: the hock, the slow hour, the pinch of sugar she would have denied to your face. He put them in a foil pan and folded the lid over the rim and put a towel around it and set it on the floorboard of the truck, and he drove out to Pleasant Grove at half past ten.

The grass was mowed. Somebody was still keeping the grounds up, the way somebody always is.

There were no tables. There were no cars. There was the flat place under the oaks where the tables always went, and the well house, and the mowed grass, and the sound of a truck on the road a long way off.

Wendell stood in the middle of that flat place at twenty to eleven in the morning with a warm foil pan in his hands.

He was not exactly grieving her. He had done that in November and done it properly. This was a different thing and it took him a while to find the words for it, and the words he finally landed on were these: there is not one thing left in my year that is anybody's on purpose.

Because it had all hung on her. Decoration Day in May. The reunion the third Saturday. The singing the Sunday before Thanksgiving. The fireworks down by the creek on the fourth, which she did not run but which happened because she called and said what time. Take away one woman with a legal pad and a year of fifty two weeks turns into fifty two weeks.

He got back in the truck and put the pan on the seat beside him and drove down.

He ate them on Tuesday, cold, standing at the icebox, and they were good, and somehow that was the worst part of the whole week.

He still has the pan. It is washed and folded and up in the cabinet over the stove, with the crease still in the rim where he turned the foil back.

Somebody else is keeping the calendar

Wendell's mistake was not that he went out there. Going out there was the truest thing he did all year.

His mistake, if it is fair to call it that, was in thinking the calendar had ever belonged to Ola.

Turn to Leviticus 23, which is the chapter where the year gets set, and read the very first line of it with your eye on the possessive. These are the feasts of the LORD. His. Not the nation's, not the family's, not the woman with the legal pad. The word sitting under the one translated feasts is not really about food at all. It is about an appointment. A fixed time, agreed in advance, to meet somebody.

An appointment implies a person waiting at the other end of it.

You are on somebody's list and you always were, and it is not a list that dies when a person does. Leviticus 23:2 calls them His appointed times, His own, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my reading of a chapter who takes that possessive and lays it against the hollow place in your year.

Now the second thing, and it is the one that turns this whole category from a duty into a gladness.

Every one of those appointments points forward. Paul says of the whole calendar that these are a shadow of things to come, but the body is of Christ. Sit with that sentence, because a shadow is not an insult. A shadow is proof. Nothing casts a shadow but a body, and if there is a shadow on the ground then there is something real standing in the light.

They are rehearsals. And a rehearsal is not the sad version of a thing. A rehearsal is the thing, practiced in advance, by people who are going to be in it.

And here is what they are all rehearsing:

Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.Revelation 19:9

A supper. Tables. A date somebody else set. An invitation list somebody else wrote in an order they did not have to write down anywhere, because they have it in their head.

You have been called to a supper that is already dated, and the calling was done from His side of the table. Revelation 19:9 puts the blessing on the ones who are called rather than on the ones who arranged it, and His Spirit is what makes an invitation land as an invitation and not as a summons.

Now let me be plain about two things, because you may be waiting for the catch.

The first is that I am not going to tell you which of those appointed times you ought to be keeping. People have argued about that for a very long time and they will go on arguing, and that argument is not this site's business and it is not what is missing from your year. It is not why you are standing on mowed grass with a warm pan. What is written is whose those appointments are, and His Spirit is at work on the hollow place in your year rather than on the argument about it.

The second matters more. If you have never kept a single one of them in your life, you are not outside of anything. Not the supper, not the family, not the calendar. Nobody at that table got in by attendance. The whole point of the chapter is whose appointments they are, and the whole point of the supper is who did the calling.

You are inside this because of the Lamb and not because of your attendance record, and that is written plainly enough that nobody has to squint at it. The same Spirit who put a marriage supper at the end of the book is putting something to look forward to back into your year.

That is the thing Wendell had lost, and it is the thing this hands back. Not a duty. Something ahead.