Where Love Is

Transcript

Hello, my friend… so glad you're with me today. This is By God's Call — day 133, Where Love Is.

"Better is a dinner of herbs where love is than a fattened ox and hatred with it." Proverbs 15:17.

Just let that sit for a moment.

Solomon — the wealthiest man of his generation, a man who knew what a feast looked like — looks straight at you and says: take the simple table. Take the humble plate. As long as love is sitting there with you. Because without love, the fattened ox doesn't nourish anyone. It just fattens the silence.

Think about this with me. The table is a revealing place. Maybe the most honest place in the whole house. You can stage the living room, buy the right furniture, make everything look the part — but the table tells the truth. What is running underneath the words there? Is there hurry? Is there a screen? Are there eyes that keep looking away? Or is there real conversation, eye contact, presence that says "I am here — with you"?

Because what people carry from their childhoods is not the menu from the Christmas dinner. It's the feeling. It's the atmosphere. It's whether they felt seen, or whether they felt invisible. It's the laughter that broke loose at that table, or the heavy silence that nobody was brave enough to break.

And here is the danger Proverbs is warning us about: we can spend our lives chasing the fattened ox — more income, more comfort, more achievement — and pay for it with the very thing the table was meant to hold. The love. The presence. The unhurried time with the people we love most.

It's not that abundance is wrong. It's that abundance without peace is not a feast — it is a burden. And a simple meal, where Christ presides, where there are real questions and real eyes meeting across the table and grace said before the eating — that table, my friend, is a celebration. Plain bread becomes a feast when peace is seated there with you.

Peace is the seasoning. And that seasoning cannot be bought at any market. It comes from a choice — the choice to put presence before performance. To value what happens between people more than what is on the plate. To let in what actually feeds the soul.

So today — and I'm asking you to do this, not just think about it, do it — make this morning's breakfast a screen-free table. Phone away from the plate. Notifications off. Eyes up. Sit down. Look at every person who is there with you. And ask one real question — not "did you sleep okay?" but something that opens a door: "What are you hoping for this week?" "Is anything weighing on you?" A question that says: I want to see you.

That is the love this verse is talking about. Not the feeling that shows up when everything is easy — the love that chooses to be present even when the plate is simple, even when life is moving fast. That love changes a table. That love changes a home.

Stay close to God. Pray — then act. I'll see you tomorrow, my friend.