Jesus keeps setting tables in the strangest places.
I know because I’ve stumbled into a few of them.
A child’s bedroom where something sacred was being violated. A house full of secrets. A girl learning too early that the world could be beautiful and monstrous at the same time. I thought I was abandoned there. I thought God had left the building.
But looking back, I can see Him sitting quietly in the corner of the room, refusing to leave even when everyone else had.
Years later, I found another table.
A filthy room. A needle. The slow surrender of a life that had grown tired of itself. I wasn’t searching for God then. I was searching for a way not to feel. A way to disappear without technically dying.
Yet somehow He was there too.
Not as a policeman. Not as a judge.
More like a stubborn friend who refuses to take the hint.
The God I eventually met was nothing like the God I imagined.
He was not waiting at the finish line demanding an explanation.
He was sitting in the wreckage.
Waiting.
In the aftermath of abuse. In the chemical fog of addiction. In the long nights when I could no longer tell the difference between self-destruction and survival.
Waiting.
It is easy to believe God lives in cathedrals. Much harder to believe He wanders the back alleys of the human soul.
But that is where I found Him.
Not in my virtue.
Not in my recovery.
Not in the carefully edited version of my testimony.
I found Him in the places I am least proud of. The places I would hide if I could.
And perhaps that is the great scandal of the Gospel.
Jesus keeps setting tables in places no respectable person would think to look.
And when I finally arrived, bruised and exhausted and carrying the debris of my own life, I discovered the meal had already been prepared. He had been waiting there the whole time.
B🤍
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