The Invitation You Assumed Was A Mistake

The last card in the run had his own name on it.

He had set the type himself, three days before, letter by letter out of the case. The family name, the date, the hour, the line about the courtyard and the long table. Ninety cards. He knew the text so well by then that he had stopped reading it and started only checking it, which is a different thing, the way you check a wall for straightness instead of looking at it.

He printed them Thursday and hung them along the line to dry. Friday morning he went down the row taking them off and squaring them into a stack for the messenger.

And the last one was not for anybody on the list.

It was for him. His own name, spelled right, including the part that everybody gets wrong.

He stood in the middle of the shop with it in both hands and the solvent smell all round him and worked the thing out logically, because he was a logical man and logic was the only comfort in the room. A misfeed. A stray. He must have set his own name into a line at some point to test the spacing and never lifted it back out of the frame.

He went and checked the frame. His name was not in it.

So he checked the case, tray by tray, and then he counted the stack twice, and the ninety were the ninety. This one was the ninety first.

He put it face down under the ink can, which is what a man does with a thing he does not want to look at and cannot throw away, and went back to work.

The host came in himself on the Monday afternoon, which hosts do not do. He came about a second run of forty, and he stood at the counter while the order was written up, and then, when it was written, he did not leave.

"You had a card left over," he said.

"There was an extra."

"There was no extra," the host said. "Go and look at the ink on it."

The man went and got it out from under the can and turned it over, and even in that light he could see it. The ink was wrong. Not his ink. Blacker, laid on heavier, the way a person writes when they are pressing because they mean it.

"I did that one myself," the host said. "At the table. Sunday night."

It was not a misfeed

Your year does not have Him in it anywhere, and you have made a kind of peace with that.

Twelve months of other people's dates. Birthdays, the appointment for the tires, somebody's baby shower, the week off in July that you spend catching up on the house. It goes round and round, and none of the squares on it are His, and every so often you notice that and feel something you would not call sadness because you have never had a word for it. Nothing in Scripture ever handed the year over to other people, and the noticing is His Spirit at work in you, not a low mood you have never had a word for.

And somewhere underneath, quieter, there is the other thing: that if any of it ever did have your name on it, it was probably a mistake.

So let me put the card back in your hands.

Jesus told a story about a man who made a great supper, and there is a detail in it that people race past. The invitations went out twice.

A certain man made a great supper, and bade many: and sent his servant at supper time to say to them that were bidden, Come; for all things are now ready.Luke 14:16-17

Read it again for the sequence. The first invitation goes out well ahead. Then, at the hour itself, a second one: come, everything is ready now. That second sending is what almost nobody has ever been told about, and it is the one you are standing inside of. You have been invited already, and you are being called again at the hour, and it is His Spirit who makes that second knock audible in a room where you had stopped expecting one.

Now go back further, to the chapter where the whole rhythm starts. Leviticus 23 opens by saying these are the feasts of the LORD, holy gatherings, to be proclaimed in their seasons. The word underneath feasts is nearer to appointments than to parties. Fixed meetings. Times set in advance by the One doing the inviting, which means the calendar was His before it was anybody's, and no one has to invent an occasion out of nothing.

And every one of them leans forward. A rehearsal is not the performance and never pretends to be. There is a supper up ahead that all of it has been pointing at, and Jesus said so plainly on the last night, that He would not eat of it again until it was fulfilled in the kingdom of God.

And in this mountain shall the LORD of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow.Isaiah 25:6

That is a menu, not a metaphor. And John writes down the line he was told to write: blessed are they who are called to the marriage supper of the Lamb. Called. Invited. Named.

Hear this where you are, and hear it as finished. You are on the list. What is written says the invitation was already sent and the second call has gone out at the hour, and the Spirit and the Bride are the ones saying come, which means the invitation is not mine and the pressing of the ink was not mine either.

Now, the thing I am not going to do. I am not going to tell you which of His appointed times you must keep, or when, or how. Believers who love God have gone back and forth over that for a very long time, and none of it is what this page is for. Nobody here is handing you a calendar you can fail. If you keep none of them, you are not outside anything; if you have kept them your whole life, nothing here is checking your work.

What I am telling you is that the year has something of His in it, and it always did, and it is glad.