Four Crossed Off Five

The list has been on the back of the pantry door since the March she moved into the house on Coldwater Road, and she wrote it standing on a kitchen chair so it would sit high enough that a person had to look up to read it.

Four lines, in pencil. Four things that would, when she had them, finally do it.

What they were is not going to be written down here, and that is on purpose. Name one and every person reading holds their own up beside it and starts doing arithmetic about whose wanting was the more reasonable, and there has never been a version of that arithmetic that fed anybody.

The first line went through the winter she turned thirty. The second took nine years. The third came so quietly she nearly forgot to mark it, and she went back three days later and drew the line anyway, because a thing that takes that long has earned the pencil.

The fourth went through on a Tuesday in early September.

She came in the back door with it. The actual thing. The one she had wanted longest and said least about. She set her keys in the dish by the door. She set the thing on the counter next to the salt. She took the pencil off the window sill where the pencil always sits, opened the pantry door, and drew the line.

Then she stood there.

She had planned for the getting. She had rehearsed the getting in the truck on the way home, twice, out loud, the way a person does when nobody is riding with them. What she had not planned for was the eleven minutes after. The kitchen was exactly as quiet as it had been that morning. The clock over the stove made the same small tick it has made for eleven years. The skillet was where she left it. Nothing in the room had been told.

So she did what she does. She cut an onion. She got the skillet hot. She made supper for one and ate it standing up at the counter with her hip against the drawer, because sitting down is what a person does when somebody is expecting them.

Around nine she washed the skillet, dried it, and hung it on its nail. She wiped the counter twice. And then, without one moment of deciding to, she opened the pantry door, took the pencil off the sill, and wrote a fifth line underneath the four.

She recognized the handwriting before she recognized what she had done.

It was hers. Same slant, same hard press on the downstroke, same habit of not quite closing the letter at the end of a word. Her own hand had written a fifth thing under four that were crossed off, at nine o'clock at night, in a warm kitchen, on the best day she had had in a year.

She shut the door on it and went to bed.

In the morning the light comes across that door before it reaches anywhere else in the room. Five lines. Four with pencil drawn through them. And the fifth one sitting there in fresher lead, waiting to be taken seriously.

The fifth line is not the evidence you think it is

Most people read that fifth line as a verdict on themselves. Four things arrived, four things were genuinely good, and the wanting kept its appointment anyway, so the wanting must be the flaw. That is the arithmetic almost everybody does standing at the pantry door, and it goes wrong at the first step.

There is a line in Proverbs about this that hardly ever gets quoted, because it refuses to sound like a moral.

The righteous eateth to the satisfying of his soul: but the belly of the wicked shall want.Proverbs 13:25

Read what it does not say. It does not say the righteous learns to need less. It does not say the righteous develops a smaller appetite and calls that maturity. It says the righteous eats until the soul is satisfied. Eating is the verb. Satisfying is the destination. And the whole sentence takes for granted a hungry person, sitting down, getting through a real meal.

You are a person with an appetite God built on purpose, and a fifth line under four crossed off is evidence of how much room is in you, never evidence of a fault. I am not saying that to be kind about it. Proverbs 13:25 puts satisfying at the end of eating rather than at the end of restraint, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a satisfied soul and sets it in front of somebody at a counter at nine at night with a pencil still in her hand.

Look at what the four things actually did. Every one of them carried its own weight and not one ounce more. Each was worth wanting. Each was worth the years. Not one of them was ever the size of a soul, and none of them ever claimed to be. The four did not fail her. They finished, which is a different thing entirely, and a person can grieve the difference without having done anything wrong.

You have a soul that was made to be satisfied rather than managed, and nobody handed you a defective one. His word puts the righteous at a table eating to the full, and the Holy Spirit does not read that line over you as a warning about your appetite. He reads it as a description of what is on offer in your own kitchen tonight.

What a list can hold, and what it cannot

A list is a fine tool and a poor container. It is excellent for arranging a life and useless for filling one, and there is no shame in having discovered that from the inside instead of being told.

Every line on that pantry door did what a line can do. It named something worth having. It gave a decade a direction. When it arrived it was good, and none of that goodness is canceled by nine o'clock in the evening. The trouble was never that the four things were wrong to want. The trouble is that a soul is a larger vessel than any of them, and pouring a cup into a well does not make the well a liar.

You were not built wrong for outlasting four good things. Scripture says the righteous eats to the satisfying of the soul, which is a sentence about a capacity rather than a correction of one, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying that line toward you the whole time you were reading it as an accusation.

So the question at the pantry door changes. It stops being what is the matter with me, and starts being who feeds a thing this size. That is not a smaller question. It is a much bigger one, and it has an answer that has been standing in the room the entire time.

He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.Psalm 107:9

Notice the grammar there too. He satisfies. He fills. The longing soul is not required to become a less longing soul first. It is met as it is, longing and all, and the filling is done to it by Somebody else.

You have been fed before and did not always notice it, because nothing ever came to the door announcing itself as a meal. Psalm 107:9 says He fills the hungry soul with goodness, and the Holy Spirit has been putting goodness on your table in ordinary light for years, in the middle of the very decade you have been filing under unsatisfied.