Life is a Scattered Feast

He leads me each day, provider God. He created me needy and messy. Hungry before I know what I hunger for, dependent before I ever learn to pretend that I wasn't. And day after day, he leads me. I see beauty and brokenness, abandonment and acceptance, hope and dread, mourning and dancing, weeping and laughter, death and resurrection. I see blooming and wilting, wonder and monotony, smiling and wincing, emptiness and abundance, darkness and illumination, speaking and silence. I know complexity and simplicity, embracing and wrestling, torment and ecstasy, wandering and epiphany, the sudden moment and the long advent. The prayer answered before I finish asking, and the prayer that seems to wander for years through a silent heaven. I have known doors flung open and doors that would not move, tables crowded with laughter, and chairs painfully empty. Days I wanted to hold forever and nights I begged to end. I have gathered things I thought I would keep and lost things I thought I could never live without. And somehow, through it all, he leads me, day by day, not by handing me a map, not by explaining the wilderness, not by telling me what will be served tomorrow, but by setting the table in the middle of today. This is the table he prepares before me, temporary, ephemeral, movable though it may be, sometimes beside still waters, sometimes in the presence of my enemies, sometimes beneath a sky filled with stars, and sometimes in a room where I can barely see the next thing in front of me. But there is bread here, there is grace here, there is enough for this day. The meal is sure, the menu is unknown. You see, faith is learning to sit down anyway, to receive what comes without demanding to know what comes next, to taste, to grieve, to laugh, to wonder, to give thanks, to discover that even here, especially here, the shepherd has not lost me. I am not self-made, I am not self-sustaining, I am not my own shepherd, I am a dependent of God, and every morning mercy sets another place at the table, every evening grace gathers the fragments, until one day the temporary table is folded away, the restless wandering ends, the shadows disappear, and faith becomes sight. Until then, he leads me, he feeds me, he stays with me day by day, and life, strange, beautiful, aching, unfinished life, is a scattered feast.