The Crate Kept Under the Table

By nine o'clock the street is loud enough that Verna does most of her business by pointing, and she likes it that way.

Thirty-one years on that stall. Green bananas at the front where people can see them, thyme and scallion in bunches, the tomatoes she will argue with you about, and a plastic crate on the ground under the table with a piece of blue cloth over it.

Everybody who works that street knows the crate is not for sale. New boys learn it in a week. A man reached under there once for a hand of plantain and Verna's daughter caught his arm and said, not that one, uncle, and he said sorry three times and did not do it again.

It goes out at half past eleven on a Thursday, when Miss Ivy comes down with her cart. Miss Ivy is eighty-six. Her hands shake, she cannot reach anything above the second row, she takes forty minutes to do what other people do in eight, and if she had to pick over a stall in that crowd she would not come at all. So Verna picks for her on Wednesday night and puts it under the table with the cloth on.

And here is the thing you would notice if you stood there a while. What is in that crate is not the best of the stall. It is not the show tomatoes. It is soft fruit that Miss Ivy can actually eat, and small yams because she cooks for one, and the thyme she likes, which is not the thyme most people like. If you graded that crate against the front of the table it would come second.

It is not under the table because it is superior. It is under the table because of whose it is.

Verna is sixty and she does that every single week and she has never once in her life applied it to herself. In her mind chosen is a word about quality. God picks the ones who came out right, the ones with the testimony and the calm home and the settled mind, and Verna has a temper and a son she does not talk about and a whole shelf of things she has never told anybody. So when the reading on Sunday says chosen, Verna hears it the way she hears a beauty contest result, and she claps for whoever won.

The cloth is on the crate at her feet the whole time she is thinking it.

You have stood behind that table. Your stall sells something else. But you know that reading of the word, the one where chosen means best, and you know exactly which shelf in you rules you out.

Moses shuts the door on the good reason

Deuteronomy 7 is a speech, and in the middle of it Moses says the sentence, and then, because he knows exactly what people will do with it, he immediately says the next one.

For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth.Deuteronomy 7:6

Now hold that, and hear what comes straight after it. The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people.

Read that twice. God does not leave the reason open for anybody to fill in. He states the reason people would assume, and He denies it, and then He tells them the actual position they were in, which was the smallest, the least, the ones you would not have picked.

You were chosen, and the reason you keep supplying was ruled out in the verse itself. That is the written word and not my kindness across a market table, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a speech given on the edge of a river and sets it down on a wet street at nine in the morning.

Because here is what you have been doing, and I say it gently. You have been reading chosen as a verdict on merchandise. Best of the stall. Front of the table. And the passage that uses the word takes the trouble, in the very next breath, to say that the ones chosen were the fewest, which is to say the crate under the table, which is to say the small yams and the soft fruit and the thyme most people do not want.

A special people unto himself

Then look where the choosing points. Unto himself. That is the destination of the whole sentence.

The old word behind special people means a personal treasure. Not a national asset. Not stock. The thing an owner sets aside out of everything else because it is his own, kept back from general sale, and the setting aside is an act of possession and not a grading of quality.

That is a crate under a table with a cloth on it. It is not on the stall because it already belongs to somebody, and it is not for sale at any price, and the price was never the point.

You are His own treasure, set aside out of general sale, and it is already settled. Deuteronomy 7 says unto himself in plain words, and the same Spirit who carried that speech across the Jordan is the one making it a present fact in a woman with a temper and a shelf of things she has never said.

Now I will guard it, because doctrine that cannot be danced to is usually doctrine that has been bent. I am not telling you that how you live has nothing to do with it. Moses spends the whole book on how a chosen people live and he does not soften a syllable. I am telling you the crate was packed on Wednesday night, before Miss Ivy walked down that street, and no grading of the fruit put it under the table. That is not a lower word. It is a heavier one, and the weight of it is on Him.

And the people who taught you to hear chosen as a grade were mostly graded themselves, and it wore them out. Nobody is on trial here. There is a cloth, and a crate, and a name that is not written on it because everybody already knows.