The Domino Table Outside the Shop

The table goes out at about six most evenings and it comes in at about ten, and it has been doing that on that corner for thirty years under three different owners of the store.

Folding table, plastic chairs, dominoes that make the correct noise on the wrong surface, and four men who take it extremely seriously.

Nestor walks past it twice a day.

He is fifty and he has lived on that street for eleven years, and he knows four of them by name, and they know his, and there is a whole vocabulary of nods and one-word greetings between him and that table that has been developing for a decade.

He has never sat down at it.

That is not a story about being excluded. He would want that clear. He has been invited, in the loose way men invite each other, probably fifteen times.

Here is what he does instead. At about eight, most evenings, he sits at his own kitchen table with a puzzle. It is a good puzzle and he is good at it and it takes about forty minutes and it is genuinely the part of his day he looks forward to.

His own table. His own game. His own corner. Every night, alone, for eleven years, and the last few of them accompanied by a tiredness he has not been able to explain to himself, because on paper his life is fine and he likes his own company and he is not lonely in the way people mean when they say it.

Tonight, walking back with a bag, Efraín looks up and says: we are three.

Two words. That is the whole invitation and it has been the whole invitation for eleven years.

And Nestor says what he always says, which is: another time.

He gets in, and puts the bag down, and puts the light on over the kitchen table, and stands there.

Because he has said another time on that corner for six years at least, and probably closer to eleven, and it has never once occurred to him until this exact moment to ask when he thought the other time was going to be.

You have that corner. Yours might be a chair or a screen or a very good routine. But you know the tiredness, and you know it is not explained by anything in your life, and you know the phrase you have been using for years.

Members one of another

Romans 12 is where Paul turns from doctrine to living, and after telling them to present themselves as a living sacrifice he immediately starts describing what they are to each other.

So we, being many, are one body in Christ, and every one members one of another.Romans 12:5

Members one of another.

Read the direction of that. Not: members of Christ, which he has already said. Members one of another, which is horizontal, and mutual, and which makes the belonging run sideways between people as well as upward.

You have the vertical one. Nobody who has watched you for eleven years would question the vertical one. You pray, you mean it, and your relationship with God is not in doubt in this article at all.

The sentence says there is a second direction, and that the second direction is not an optional extra for people who like company. It is in the description of what the body is.

You are a member of other people, and Scripture states it in the same breath as being a member of Christ. That is the written word and not my read of your evening, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence about a body and lays it under a kitchen light at eight o'clock.

And notice the first three words, because they are doing work. So we, being many.

Being many is in the description. Paul does not present the manyness as a difficulty to be managed or a complication that comes with faith. It is the arrangement. One body, many, members of each other, and none of those three facts is in tension with the others.

Sameness is not required anywhere in it

Now the verse immediately before, because it answers the reason you have never sat down, which you have never said out loud and which is not the reason you give.

For as we have many members in one body, and all members have not the same office.

All members have not the same office.

Paul builds the not-the-same into the structure before he says members one of another. The belonging does not run on similarity. It never has. You do not have to be a domino man to sit at a domino table, and you do not have to be like anybody to be a member of them.

That matters, because the reason you say another time is not that you are busy at eight o'clock.

It is that you have looked at that table for eleven years and concluded, quietly and without ever putting it in words, that you are not that. Not the kind of man who is loud on a corner. Not somebody with the right jokes. Not a person who would know what to do with his hands for the first ten minutes.

This is yours, and the arrangement never required you to be like them, and it is already settled. Romans 12 says all members have not the same office in the verse before it says members one of another, and the same Spirit who gives the differing gifts in the next verse is the one making it a present fact in a man standing under a kitchen light with a bag still to unpack.

Now let me guard this the way this site guards it.

I am not telling you the answer is to go to more things or that attendance settles anything. There are people reading this with no corner, no table and nobody at all within reach, and none of this gets smaller for them. Members one of another is a statement about what is true of you, not a schedule.

And I am not telling you the puzzle is a fault. It is a good forty minutes and you should keep it.

What I am telling you is where the tiredness comes from. You have been carrying a two-directional thing in one direction for eleven years, and that is heavy in a way that does not show up on paper, and it is exactly the kind of tired that a person cannot explain to themselves.