At the Table of the Heart

At the Table of the HeartWhat is keeping the Word of God from producing fruit in your life?Not in someone else’s life. Yours.That is the question Socrates brings to the table. Five people have pulled their chairs up to a round table in the early morning hours. A candle is burning. The smell of turned earth comes through the open window. And before the morning is over, each of them will see their own soil for the first time.James has been in church for eleven years and reads his Bible through whatever the news told him to think first. Bethany springs up with genuine enthusiasm every time the faith asks something of her - and withers just as reliably when the asking gets specific. Lucinda plans everything months in advance, goes to church every Sunday, and has never once produced a measurable crop for the kingdom of God. And Pastor D. - sitting in the good ground seat - will be the first to tell you that good ground is not where he started, the victory is not his, and the battle with the flesh has not ended.This is not a book about other people’s soil conditions. It is a mirror. The four soils Jesus described in Matthew 13 are not four types of people sorted into permanent categories. They are four conditions that every person at this table - and every reader holding this book - carries in some measure. The question is which condition is dominant. And what it is going to take for the ground to change.Socrates does not let anyone off the hook. James’s information ecosystem. Bethany’s empathy deployed as a weapon. Lucinda’s lifetime of plans that were always about herself. All of it is pressed with the patient precision that has been Socrates’ gift for twenty-four centuries. And underneath all of it runs the same invitation that has been running since a woman came to a well at noon and met a Man who told her everything she ever did and offered her water that would never run dry.The Sower is still sowing.The seed is still good.Come to the table.At the Table of the Heart is in the At the Table series