The Free Table Nobody Trusted

Every Saturday morning, Maria Gonzalez sets up a folding table outside her bakery on Magnolia Street in downtown San Antonio. She covers it with a checkered cloth, loads it with fresh conchas, empanadas, and bolillos still warm from the oven, and props up a hand-painted sign: "Free. No catch. Just eat."

Most people walk past. They glance sideways, suspicious. A few stop and ask what she's selling. "Nothing," she says. "It's free." They shake their heads and keep moving, some pulling out their phones to order a four-dollar coffee from the chain around the corner.

It's the ones who have nothing left to lose who sit down first. The night-shift worker too tired to pretend. The grandmother stretching a fixed income past its breaking point. The teenager who skipped breakfast again. They take a seat, bite into something that was made for them before they ever asked, and something loosens behind their eyes.

"Why do you spend money on what is not bread," the prophet Isaiah asked ancient Israel, "and your labor on what does not satisfy?" God stands at the table of grace every single day, offering what no amount of striving can purchase — mercy, restoration, a life that actually nourishes the soul. We keep walking past, convinced the good stuff must cost something.

It doesn't. The invitation stands. Come, eat, and live.