The First Cup Is Poured For The Guest

In his grandmother's house the first cup of the day is never drunk by anybody who lives there, and Yusuf spent about fifteen years thinking this was a superstition.

The rule is simple. The water goes on before anything else. The first cup is poured, and it goes on the low table by the door, and it stays there.

If somebody comes, they get it. If nobody comes it goes cold and gets tipped into the lemon tree at midday and nobody makes a fuss about it.

Yusuf, when he was young, asked why and got the answer children get, which is that this is what we do. When he was seventeen he decided it was a bit ridiculous, and he said so, and his grandmother laughed at him and poured the cup anyway.

He went away for eleven years. University and then work and then a city where he knew four people.

He came back in his late twenties for a funeral and stayed on for two weeks, and one morning he was up before her, and he stood in that kitchen at half six not knowing what to do with himself, and then he put the water on and poured the first cup and carried it to the low table by the door.

And it was only when he put it down that he understood the whole thing, all at once, standing there, and had to sit down on the step.

The cup is not a superstition. The cup is what a house looks like when it is expecting somebody.

Nobody in eleven years had expected him anywhere. That is the part that got him. In that whole city, in all that time, there had never once been anything set out anywhere for him before he arrived. And here was a house that had been putting a cup on a table every single morning of his life, before it knew who was coming, on the basis that somebody might.

His grandmother came out about ten minutes later and saw him on the step and saw the cup on the table and did not say anything at all about it, because she is not that kind of woman. She said something about the lemon tree needing water.

He pours it now, in his own flat, in a city, with nobody coming.

You have kept a house without expecting anybody, most likely. You come into the day and the day brings whatever it brings and you deal with it as it arrives, and somewhere in there the idea of expecting God before anything happens has come to sound either like a chore or like something for people with a different temperament. And nobody has ever shown you what a cup on a table actually is.

Early Is About Direction, Not About The Clock

There is a line about seeking God early that has been used to make a great many people feel like poor sleepers, which is a considerable waste of a verse.

"O God, thou art my God; early will I seek thee: my soul thirsteth for thee, my flesh longeth for thee in a dry and thirsty land, where no water is."Psalm 63:1

Read the whole sentence rather than the famous half of it. The man is not talking about his alarm. He is in a dry place with no water and he is describing thirst, and the word early in that line is doing the work of first rather than the work of six in the morning.

Early means before. Before the other things. Before the day starts handing him what it is going to hand him.

You have been reading a verse about hunger as a verse about scheduling. Psalm 63 puts the seeking at the front of a man's attention rather than at a point on a clock, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a line written in a wilderness and puts it down beside a low table with a cup on it.

And that is exactly what the cup by the door is. It is not an achievement and it is not early rising. It is a house arranged in advance around who it expects. The pouring happens before anybody knocks, which is the whole point, because a cup poured after the guest arrives is politeness and a cup poured before is expectation.

You were made to expect Him rather than to react to Him. That is the shape of the first everywhere in the written word, and it is the Spirit of God who turns that from a nice image into something a person actually does in a kitchen at half six.

Nothing Is Required To Expect Somebody

Now the part that matters most for a tired person, and this article is written for tired people.

Expecting somebody costs nothing. It is not a work. Yusuf's grandmother is eighty-four and arthritic and the pouring of that cup takes about forty seconds and she does not consider it a discipline. If she is unwell somebody else does it. If nobody does it the world does not end.

That is what makes it different from every version of this you have probably been handed. There is no length to it, no quality threshold, no state of mind you have to arrive in. A cup on a table does not require the host to feel anything.

You have everything you need to expect God tomorrow, and it takes about as long as filling a kettle. It is written that He stands at the door and knocks, which puts the arriving on His side and leaves only the expecting on ours, and His Spirit is the one who has been coming to houses that were not expecting anybody for as long as you have lived in yours.

And say the guard clearly, because this is where a light thing turns heavy in exactly one move. Nothing on this page is a rule. No hour, no length, no ritual that has to be performed correctly, no streak, and nothing routed to any person or work anywhere at all. If tomorrow you wake late and the whole day is a scramble, you are exactly as much His at noon as at dawn, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this off the shelf where duties go.