The Seat at the End of the Bar

A quiet reading.

I was at a restaurant the other day, one familiar to me. We were there celebrating a grandson’s birthday. I had not sat in that part of the restaurant for more than twenty years.

From where I sat, I could see a seat at the end of the bar, the one closest to the takeout window. I had sat there many times during a season of my life when I was alone. They are not happy memories.

And yet there I was now, surrounded by family, celebrating a milestone in my grandson’s life. Even as it was happening, I could feel the moment already becoming a happy memory.

So much has changed in those twenty years. I could never have imagined that I would one day feel grateful in a place that once held so much sadness for me. Life is strange that way. A place can remain the same while the life lived around it changes completely.

It strikes me how often I seem to need a reason to appreciate what I have been given. Why is it so hard simply to live in gratitude without first being reminded by sorrow or loss? Why does remembering the hard so often help us see the good?

As I grow older, I do feel more secure, though not because I believe I can somehow avoid what is hard. Rather, I think age has taught me to trust that even difficult things are not without meaning. There can be goodness there too, though of a different kind.

That may be one of the deeper blessings of growing older: not escape from suffering, but a steadier way of holding it.

I have lived through enough rises and falls by now to know that life has a kind of balance to it. Often it is our expectations that turn blessing into entitlement and hardship into punishment.

Now it is Lent. Just the other day, someone asked why some people experience Lent almost as punishment, as though the point were to suffer because Jesus suffered.

Certainly Lent is a season of sacrifice, but then so is much of life. We give up, we carry, we endure, in seasons of joy as well as sorrow.

Perhaps what matters most is not the sacrifice itself, but whether it leads us more deeply into gratitude.

For in the end, that may be the ground on which all of life rests.

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