Eleven Years In The Back Kitchen

The swinging door at Ferraro's on Bank Street has a round window in it at head height, and in eleven years Hala Sabbagh has never once needed to look through it.

She knows the dining room by sound. The scrape of chairs at ten past six when the first table sits. The particular clatter of the dessert forks going into the tray. The rise in the room at about half past eight that means it is full and going well, and the long thinning out after ten that means somebody will soon come back and say we are done.

Her side of the door is stainless steel and steam and the extractor fan that has always rattled. Prep bench, three sinks, the tall dish machine that takes ninety seconds a rack. She starts at four and finishes when the last pan is done. She has worked there through two owners, one renovation, and the winter the boiler died, and in all that time she has been out into the dining room perhaps a dozen times, always before service, always to carry something.

She took this job because of the door. That is the truth of it and she has never said it to anybody.

She is forty four. When she was twenty six she stood at a church potluck in a fellowship hall with strip lighting and somebody said her name into a microphone to thank her for the food, and the whole room turned around at once, and something in her chest closed like a hand. She got through it. She smiled. She has no story worth telling about it, nothing dramatic, nobody was unkind. It was four seconds of being looked at by fifty people, and she has arranged eighteen years around never doing it again.

She is not proud of that. That is the part that sits under everything else.

Because Hala loves God. She reads in the morning before her son is up, actual reading, the kind where you go back over a verse three times. She prays for the delivery driver with the bad knee, by name, every week. And when the sentence gets read at church about a light and a lampstand and not putting it under a bowl, she does the arithmetic in about a second and a half, and the arithmetic is brutal and quiet and she does not argue with it.

A bowl, she thinks. Eleven years, and I built the bowl myself, and I put myself under it, and I go back every day at four.

At twenty past nine tonight the door swings and Josh comes through backward with a tray. He is nineteen and it is his fourth week and table eleven has been on him all night about a steak he did not cook. He puts the tray down and stands facing the wall with his hands on the steel for a second, breathing.

Hala does not say anything. She never says much. She pulls the rack out of the machine, hands him a clean glass of ice water, and puts her hand flat on the counter beside his for a moment, and then goes back to the sink.

Josh drinks the water, wipes his face with his sleeve, and goes back out through the door.

In the secret of thy presence

There is a psalm David wrote while people were talking about him, and the picture at the middle of it is not what most of us expect.

He is not asking for a platform. He is not asking to be vindicated in front of the room. He asks for a hiding place, and the astonishing thing about the verse is who does the hiding.

Thou shalt hide them in the secret of thy presence from the pride of man: thou shalt keep them secretly in a pavilion from the strife of tongues.Psalm 31:20

Thou shalt hide them. God is the one hiding. The secret place is not a hole His people crawled into to get away from Him, it is His own presence, and He puts them there Himself, on purpose, away from the pride of man and the strife of tongues, which is to say away from rooms full of people with opinions.

You are already inside that, and it was never a bowl you built over yourself. Psalm 31:20 has God doing the concealing and calls the concealed place His presence, and the Spirit is the one who makes a line written about a pavilion fit a room with three sinks in it.

Notice too that the psalm never treats hiddenness as a lesser grade of faith. There is no note in the margin saying this is temporary until he gets braver. It is described as keeping. It is described as the goodness laid up for those who fear Him. The whole language of it is protective, and protection assumes something worth protecting is inside.

You have a shelter that God Himself put you in, and none of it is a report on your courage. That is written in the psalm without one word of apology, and the Spirit does not stand at the swinging door with an assessment in His hand. He stands on the steam side of it, which is where He has always preferred to work.

Seen is not the same as watched

Two different things have been getting called by one name, and untangling them is most of the relief here.

Being watched is what happened in that fellowship hall. Fifty faces turning at once, a name in a microphone, four seconds of a room's attention with nothing to do with your hands. That has a cost. For some people the cost is small and for others it is enormous, and nothing in Scripture ever says the cost is imaginary or that a person who feels it is failing. It is not cowardice. It is a nervous system, and God made it, and He is not annoyed by it.

Being seen is a different thing entirely. Hagar was in a desert with nobody watching and called Him the God who sees. Nathanael was under a fig tree where there was no audience whatsoever and Jesus told him He had watched him there. Neither of them was in a room. Neither of them was on a stage. Both of them were seen right through, and in both cases it landed as tenderness rather than exposure.

You are seen, and being seen by Him has never cost you anything. John 1:48 has Jesus naming a man under a tree that nobody else was looking at, and what the Spirit does with a scene like that is not to summon you into a hall. He sits down in the room you are already in.

So the sentence about the lampstand needs reading again, slowly, because it has been doing damage in the wrong direction. A lamp on a stand gives light to all that are in the house. In the house. Not on the roof, not in the street, not in the hall with the microphone. The house Hala is in has a prep bench, three sinks, a rattling extractor fan, and a nineteen year old with his hands flat on the steel at twenty past nine.

You were placed, and the placing was His. Acts 17:26 says He determined the times and the bounds of where people live, and the same Spirit who arranged that is not embarrassed by a back kitchen. It is one of His rooms.