A Pot I Never Let Anyone Fill

The pot has been on the back burner since two o'clock and the kitchen smells like thyme and scallion and something browning, and she has not sat down since she came in from the store.

Her granddaughter is at the table doing homework badly. Her son's friend from up the road came by for a wrench and got told to stay for food, the way everybody who comes to that door gets told. There is a woman in the front room who arrived to drop off a form and is still there an hour later because nobody leaves that house on an empty stomach. Six, maybe seven plates tonight. Same as most nights.

She is good at this, and she loves it. She stands over that pot the way some people play an instrument, tasting, adjusting, dropping the heat, tasting again, and when a plate goes down in front of a tired person and their shoulders come down half an inch, she feels it in her chest. She has fed this street for nineteen years.

And then the knock. Her friend from church, holding a dish with a towel over it, saying I made too much and I thought of you.

Watch what she does, because she does it so fast that neither of them notice. She has her hands up before the towel is off. Oh no, no, no. You take that home to your family, I have a pot on, look at it, I am feeding an army in here. And she is laughing, and her friend is laughing, and the dish goes back down the steps and into a car and away up the road, and the door closes, and that was the eleventh time this year.

She goes back to the pot. She lifts the lid and the steam comes up in her face. And standing there, for about four seconds before the granddaughter asks her a question about fractions and it all closes over again, something goes through her that she has no plan for and no words for at all.

Nineteen years. And she has never once let anybody put anything in this pot.

Not one thing. Not a dish, not a bag from the store, not a Saturday of somebody else's hands doing the chopping. Everything that ever came out of that kitchen came out of her, and every time somebody arrived carrying something for her she sent it back with a joke, and she has called that faithfulness. She has called it that so long that she believes it. This is what a faithful woman is. A faithful woman is the one with the pot.

And underneath, where she does not go, there is a thing that has no shape yet, only a temperature. If I ever stopped carrying it, would there be a reason for anybody to knock.

Perhaps that is your kitchen. Perhaps yours is not a pot at all. Perhaps it is a phone that goes off and you always answer, or a car that always goes to the airport, or a room in your house that is always ready for somebody else and never for you. You feed people. You are good at it. And you cannot remember the last time you let anybody feed you, and you have a lovely, quick, funny sentence you use to send them back down the steps.

Nobody has ever fed the one who feeds

Let me say the true thing first, before anything else, because you have almost certainly been thanked for this and almost never seen through it.

What you do is good and I will not take one degree of heat off it. Feeding people is close to the center of what God is like, and a house where a stranger gets a plate has understood something most theology never reaches. That stays.

What is under examination is a rule you never agreed to and cannot remember learning, and it goes like this: I am the one who fills. It looks exactly like faithfulness from the street, which is why it has survived nineteen years unquestioned. But faithfulness is a direction of love, and this is a direction of traffic, one way, out, always out, and a person can run a one way street for decades and call it a virtue right up until the evening the pot is empty and they are still standing over it.

You are permitted to be fed, and permission was never something you had to earn by first feeding everybody else. Psalm 68:10 is written down for exactly this, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line out of an old marching psalm and sets it down beside a woman with a lid in her hand.

Thy congregation hath dwelt therein: thou, O God, hast prepared of thy goodness for the poor.Psalm 68:10

Read who is doing the preparing. Thou, O God, hast prepared. Not the strong ones in the congregation. Not the ones with the pot. God prepared it, out of His goodness, and the congregation is described as dwelling in it, which is what people do in a house somebody else built, and the poor in that sentence are simply the ones with nothing to bring.

Now notice something that will sting a little. You have spent years making sure you were never in the second half of that verse. You have arranged your entire life so that you are on the preparing end and never on the receiving end, and you have done it with charm and with jokes at the door. You are one of the ones He prepared it for, and the preparing was finished long before you decided you were staff. That is written in Psalm 68:10 and it does not carve out an exception for the woman with the ladle, and the Holy Spirit is not in the business of keeping good cooks out of the dining room.

Every verb in that psalm belongs to Him

There is a psalm everybody knows and almost nobody reads slowly, and it is the one this whole page stands under, so let me put it down without improving it.

Psalm 23 says He makes me to lie down in green pastures. He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul. And then, at the table, Psalm 23:5: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies, thou anointest my head with oil, my cup runneth over.

Count the verbs and see whose they are. He makes. He leads. He restores. He prepares. He anoints. He fills the cup past the brim so it spills on the cloth. There is not one job in that psalm for the sheep. The sheep lies down, drinks, eats, and gets oil poured on its head, and the whole poem is a picture of somebody being done to, on purpose, by Somebody who is good at it.

And here is what I want you to feel rather than think. That is not a lower position. You have been treating the receiving end as the weak end for nineteen years, and Psalm 23 puts the King's own guest in that chair with oil running down His hair. You are seated at a table you did not prepare, and the cup in front of you was filled past the brim by Somebody else's hand. Psalm 23:5 says He prepares and He anoints and He fills, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries that written table into a kitchen where somebody has been standing up since two o'clock.

Do not let anybody turn that table into a symbol so fast that you never get a meal out of it. It is a real table with real food on it. The oil is real, the cup runs over onto real cloth, and the God who wrote it down through David is not being poetic at your expense. You have a plate at that table tonight, and it has food on it, and no part of it is waiting on your hands. The written word says He prepares it of His goodness, and His Spirit is the One who makes a psalm into an actual evening meal for a person who has forgotten what it is like to be served.