It Was Only What I Had

Nell carries the pot with both hands and a dish towel folded over the lid, because the handles get hot and because that is how her mother carried things.

Arlen Combs lives at the bend on Pine Fork Road, in the gray house with the porch that leans a little. His wife has been in the hospital in town since Tuesday. Nell knows this the way anybody on the road knows anything, which is that somebody said it at the pumps.

She sets the pot down on the top step and knocks with two knuckles, and Arlen comes to the door in his socks and looks at the pot and says, well now.

They sit. He on the step above, her on the one below, the way people do when nobody wants to make it a visit. The concrete is still holding the afternoon. Down at the bend a truck goes by and lifts a hand out the window and they both lift one back without looking to see who it was.

He talks about the drive in and the parking and how they have moved his wife twice to different floors. Nell says the things you say. She notices he has not shaved and that there are four days of mail on the chair beside the door.

After a while he says, this was awful good of you.

And Nell says, oh, it was only what I had.

She means it. It is not modesty, and it is not a thing she says to be told otherwise. It is a plain accounting. There was a chicken carcass in the freezer from Sunday and a bag of carrots going soft and half an onion in a bowl with plastic over it, and she was making soup for herself anyway, and she doubled the water. That is the whole of it. She did not go anywhere. She did not buy anything. She did not think about it much.

That is what she cannot get past, sitting there on the second step with her hands empty now.

A gift is a thing you go out of your way for. A gift costs. A gift is what the woman at church does, who drives eleven miles with a casserole in a proper carrier. Nell walked two hundred feet down her own road with a pot she was already stirring.

So she does not think she gave Arlen Combs anything at all. She thinks she happened to have soup, and he happened to be sad, and the two facts met in the driveway.

The pot sits on the step between them, steaming faintly under the towel, and Arlen puts one hand flat on the lid the way a man warms his hand on a stove.

He named the limit and then He called it done

There is a house in Bethany where somebody breaks a jar open over Jesus' head, and the room turns on her immediately.

The complaint is a reasonable one, and that is what makes it worth reading twice. That ointment was worth a year of a working man's wages, and it could have been sold and the whole of it handed to the poor, and now it is running down somebody's neck and into a rug.

Jesus answers the room, and then He says a sentence about her that is one of the oddest compliments in Scripture.

She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying.Mark 14:8

Look at the middle of it. What she could. He does not say she has done a great thing. He does not say she has done more than anybody expected. He puts His finger directly on her ceiling, which is the exact place she would have been ashamed of, and He says that is where it was done.

Most of us have a private version of that ceiling. Nell's is a pot of soup out of a freezer and a soft bag of carrots. Yours is whatever you hand over while saying it was nothing, and you say it because you have already priced it and found it ordinary.

You are handing over the only thing that was ever asked of you, which is what was in the house. That is written into Mark 14:8 as plainly as anything in the gospel, and the Holy Spirit does not argue a person into a line like that; He seats it, in the kitchen or on the step where the person actually is.

And notice He does not upgrade her. He does not tell the room she was really doing something enormous and they were too dull to see it. He agrees with their measurement and disagrees with their conclusion. It was ointment. It was what she had. It was done.

Ordinary was always the material

Here is the thing that will not go in easily, and I am not going to dress it up, because dressing it up is what has been done to you.

The ordinary is not a lesser grade of the real thing. It is the material. It has been the material from the beginning.

Five loaves belonged to a boy who had brought his lunch. A jar of oil was what a widow had left in the back of a cupboard. Two small coins were what a woman had in her hand on her way past the treasury. Not one of those was upgraded before it was used, and not one of those people was told afterward that they had been secretly remarkable all along.

You have not been holding back the good version of this, because there is no good version being withheld. The written word keeps handing God ordinary things out of ordinary houses, and the same Spirit who filled a room in Bethany over a broken jar is not raising an eyebrow at a pot of soup on Pine Fork Road.

That is why the word could is doing so much work in Mark 14. Could is a limit. Every one of us has one, and most of us have spent years quietly apologizing for ours, as though the limit were the failure. He looked straight at hers and named it and did not soften it, and then He said the thing was finished.

You were never asked for the eleven mile drive and the proper carrier. Scripture put that beyond debate when it recorded what she could and let the sentence stand, and what the Spirit adds is that it is about you, in your own kitchen, with whatever is in it tonight.

There is no hidden greatness in this and you do not need one. A hidden greatness would just be another standard with better manners. The soup was soup.