The Dessert Table

The Dessert Table

We were driving along a familiar country road, a dear friend and I, talking about our lives. About struggles and disappointments, about our own doubts and failings, and about how God keeps on showing up in the midst of everything. About how relentless his grace is and how much of it we might be missing as we catalog our every hurt and wish for what we don’t yet have.

We spoke of small comforts, of new insights, of character and how slowly (and sometimes painfully) it grows. Then there was silence in the car for a mile or two before my friend said, “Don’t get me wrong—I’m pleased that he’s present and doing a work—but sometimes you just want to go straight to the dessert table.”

Amen.

Enough with the vitamins and necessary nutrients of faith. I want the sugar high of blessing, spread out like a banquet for my choosing and my pleasure.

But life is not an endless dessert table set up to satisfy my sweet tooth for ease and comfort. And underneath my friend’s words sat this hard and lovely truth: life serves what it serves, and a loving God is sovereign over every bite.

The hard swallows help us to fully savor the loveliest morsels—and to give thanks for them when they arrive. “The human spirit,” wrote C. S. Lewis, “will not even begin to surrender self-will as long as all seems to be well with it.” ^a Lewis also says,

What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, ‘What does it matter so long as they are contented?’ . . .

I should very much like to live in a universe which was governed on such lines. But since it is abundantly clear that I don’t, and since I have reason to believe, nevertheless, that God is Love, I conclude that my conception of love needs correction. ^b

Our bitterest struggles are the very things that drive us hungry into his presence. His is the only dessert table where there is truly fullness of joy and where pleasures last not for a moment, but forever.

In your presence there is fullness of joy; at your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

Psalm 16:11, ESV

^a C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 90.

^b Ibid., 31–32.