The Promise On The Fridge

It is twenty to eight on Monday and Stephen is standing at the counter in a way that keeps the fridge door out of the corner of his eye.

He is not aware that he is doing it. He notices only that he has filled the kettle from the wrong side of the sink and has been holding the milk carton for longer than a person needs to hold a milk carton.

The sheet is at eye level, under the magnet shaped like a lemon that Ruth won at a fair when she was six. Printed at the top, then a blank space, then three dotted lines. His own handwriting on all three.

He wrote them on Thursday night. The week had been good, genuinely good, and he wants that on the record because the easy thing now would be to go sour about it, and it would not be true. The singing had been the kind where you stop hearing yourself. The man speaking had been kind and unhurried and had not laid a finger of guilt on anybody. When he handed the sheets down the row it felt less like a demand than like an obvious next step, the way things do at half past nine on a Thursday in a warm room.

Stephen wrote down Rob from work. He wrote down his brother in law. He wrote down the neighbor two doors up whose name he had to check with Ruth afterward.

Then the week ended, and everybody went home, and Monday came the way Monday does.

Ruth comes down for cereal and says something about a bus and puts the radio on. He nods. He is doing the arithmetic he has been doing since he woke up, which is a very old arithmetic and he learned it long before Thursday.

Three names. Nothing done about any of them. Sunday gone, and he had a chance in the driveway with the neighbor and said something about the gutters instead.

The kettle clicks off.

He has been a Christian for twenty-two years and he has a drawer upstairs, and if you opened it you would find a folded sheet from a conference and a card from a weekend away and a page torn out of a notebook, and every one of them has his handwriting on it, and every one of them is a Thursday that ran into a Monday.

He pours the water and does not look at the fridge, and something in him that has been tired for a long time says, quietly, without heat: I cannot keep doing this.

Ruth asks if he is all right. He says he is fine, and he is not lying, exactly.

What Martha was carrying that afternoon

There is a house in Luke 10 with two sisters in it and a guest, and almost everybody remembers it as a story about being too busy. It is not, quite.

Look at what Martha was actually doing. She was serving Jesus. In her own house, with her own hands, at real cost, and nobody in the story says the serving was wrong. What the text says is that she was cumbered about much serving, which is a wonderful old word for being wrapped around with a thing until you cannot turn your head.

And then He says the line.

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:42

Read the last clause slowly, because that is the whole of it. It shall not be taken away from her. He does not describe an achievement. He describes a possession, and He specifies that nobody can remove it, which is a strange thing to say about an activity and a very ordinary thing to say about a gift.

You have the good part already, and nothing that happened between Thursday and Monday has moved it. I am not saying that to let you off. Luke 10:42 is written and it says the thing cannot be taken away, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an old sentence about a house in Bethany land on a man holding a milk carton at twenty to eight.

Notice that Jesus is not angry with Martha and He is not embarrassed by her. He says her name twice, which is what you do with somebody you love who is spinning. He is not correcting the serving. He is lifting the load off the woman underneath it.

You are loved in the middle of the arithmetic, and you were loved through every Monday in that drawer upstairs. Romans 8:38 puts the whole list in writing, height and depth and things present and things to come, and says none of it separates you from the love of God in Christ Jesus. What the Spirit adds is that a folded sheet in a drawer was never on the list.

The sentence was never on a dotted line

Here is what happened, and nobody in it was a villain.

Jesus said a sentence on a hillside. It was a description: you are the light of the world. It was said over people who had done nothing yet, and it had no dotted line under it, because it was not that kind of sentence.

Then two thousand years of good and sincere people did what good and sincere people do with a beautiful fact, which is to ask what we ought to do about it. And that question is not wicked. It is what love asks. But the answer got printed and handed down the row, and somewhere in the handing, a fact quietly became a form.

The man on Thursday did not do that to you. He was passing on what he had been passed, warmly, and meaning every word of it.

You are not behind, and you were never in a race that had a position to be behind in. Matthew 5:14 hands out no schedule and sets no quota, the written word has never once put a number beside it, and the same Spirit who inspired the sentence is not standing at the fridge door with a clipboard.

And I am not going to hand you a smaller version of the sheet. I am not going to tell you that three names was too many and one would be reasonable, because that is the same machine with a lower setting, and you would be standing at this counter again in a month.

You have nothing to prove this morning, and you had nothing to prove on Thursday either. Ephesians 2:8 says it is the gift of God and not of works, and it says so precisely so that nobody would ever be able to build a ledger on top of it. The Spirit is not asking you to earn back what He gave you before you were any use.