At the Table with Jesus

“Close your eyes.

Imagine you are sitting at a table with Jesus, him in one chair, you in another across from him.

Can you picture it? How does that feel?”

 This is the conversation that took place in therapy yesterday when we were talking about me losing my daddy and how I was not feeling the emotions I thought I should be feeling. I kept wondering what was wrong with me that I had not fallen apart, sobbing in grief. I felt stuck, bottled up. I’d been living in black-and-white since Daddy passed, on mute, not feeling much of anything. 

 I pictured a rough-hewn table, the kind you might get splinters from. Jesus sat across from me, hands outstretched to hold mine. My first thought was that I could not sit at that table with Jesus like we were two buddies on a coffee date.

 In my mind’s picture, I could not keep myself in the chair. I threw myself on the floor, face down. I could not look at him across the table. He was too holy. I shouldn’t even be allowed to see him.

 I lay on the floor and tears came in buckets—both in my imagining of this scenario and there on my therapist’s couch. I wondered if this was what she was expecting.

 That Jesus would even be there in the room with me in the first place was overwhelming. Didn’t he have more important things to do, more important people to help? Why was he here with me, a nobody?

 My therapist encouraged me to sit with it, to let it be what it was. “Just feel the feeling and don’t judge it” is what she always says.

 Then in less than 30 seconds in my imagined scene, I was back in my chair at the table with Jesus. He was holding my hands across the table, leaning toward me with all the empathy in the world, feeling my grief with me. Nodding in agreement with my pain. Crying real tears with me, like he did when Lazarus died.

 He knew. He understood my heartache. He’d been there, done that.

 Isaiah says of the Messiah that he was “a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief . . . Surely he hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows . . .” (Isaiah 53:3–4, KJV).

 I know this is describing Jesus as the one who would take our sins upon himself and give us his righteousness, and I am thankful he did. But he carried more than our sins. He also carried our grief. He carried our sorrows—every one of them. Friends, he cries with us, grieves with us, sorrows with us. He is not afraid of our big emotions and neither should we be. We have a Friend to help us carry them.

 When my therapist started walking me through this exercise, I was a little confused. But now I see.

 Jesus invites us to the table so he can be with us. He sits across from us, next to us, and communes with us there. When I meet him at the table, he sees all of me, and I see him. We share more than food at the table; we share our hearts.

 “Thou preparest a table before me . . . my cup runneth over.” (Psalms 23:5, KJV)

Karen Sargent is a farm wife, Mama of 5, and Grammy of 13—so far. She is a lover of Jesus, editor, cowmom, and enneagram 9w1. Karen writes about faith, family, farm life, mental health, and more at www.karenlsargent.com. Find her on Instagram @karen.l.sargent.

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