If I Were Busier

The floor did not need washing. Nell knew that when she filled the bucket.

She had washed it on Thursday, and nobody had walked on it since except her, and she wore the same soft shoes indoors that she had worn for years. But it was twenty past ten on a Monday morning and the day was standing there in front of her, whole and unopened, and washing a floor is a thing a person can be seen doing, even if the only one seeing is the person doing it.

So she washed it. It took eleven minutes. She had hoped for twenty.

The lane has four houses on it. Hers is the second, low ceilinged, with a fire she lights at four in the afternoon from the first cold week of the year onward. A bus comes past at eight and again at ten past four, and she does not usually take it. Her sister calls on Sundays. Two women come by on Wednesdays and stay an hour and a half and the three of them get through a great deal of talking in that time.

That is the life. Written out like that it looks like almost nothing, and Nell has written it out like that in her own head more often than she would admit.

By eleven she had wiped down the inside of a cupboard that was clean. By half past she was standing in the middle of the room with a cloth in her hand, looking around for the next thing, and the room was looking back at her with nothing to offer.

The afternoon went the way afternoons go. She read for a while and caught herself reading the same paragraph three times, not because it was difficult but because a small voice underneath the reading kept asking whether reading counted. She peeled potatoes for one. She put the fire on at four and it caught nicely, and the light in that room when the fire is going and the window is going blue is one of the best things she knows, and she sat down in front of it.

And that was when it came, the way it always comes, at the exact moment she stopped moving.

What did you do today.

Not in a cruel voice. That is the thing she could never explain. It is a reasonable voice, an accountant's voice, and it opens the book at today's page and finds a washed floor that was already clean, a wiped cupboard, and a paragraph read three times.

She sat with the fire ticking and thought the thought she had been thinking for about six years.

If I were busier, this would be all right.

That was it exactly. Not: I want a bigger life. Not really. She had turned down two chances at a bigger life and meant it both times. The thought was narrower and worse than that. It was that a life this size has to be justified, and busy is how a person justifies it, and she had not managed it today and was going to have to sit here in the good firelight and be looked at.

She put another log on the fire at half past seven and did not turn the lamp on for a while.

Busier was never the missing thing

There is a woman in the Gospels who has been used against people like Nell for two thousand years, and I would like to hand her back.

Martha was not lazy and she was not doing anything wrong. She was cooking for a houseful. Somebody had to, and Luke does not sneer at her for it, and neither will I. What broke in that kitchen was not her serving. It was that she started using her serving as evidence, and once you start doing that, the person sitting still in the next room becomes an accusation you can see from where you are standing.

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

One thing. Not one more thing. He does not answer Martha by giving her a shorter list or a better system for the list. He tells her there is one thing, and that the sister she is annoyed with has her hands on it already, sitting on the floor with nothing to show for the morning.

You are already holding the one needful thing, and it has never once been rated by the size of the day around it. Luke 10:42 says the good part shall not be taken away from her, which is a settled verdict spoken over somebody who had produced nothing that morning. The Holy Spirit is the One who lifts that written line out of a crowded kitchen and sets it down in a quiet room where a fire is going and a woman is being asked what she did today.

I want to stop here for one sentence, because it matters more than the rest of the paragraph. Some small lives are small by force and not by choice: illness holds them there, or somebody who needs looking after, or a hundred things nobody chose. God is not grading the size, He is not impressed by the ones that got bigger, and the fire and the chair and the hour are not a consolation prize for a life that failed to expand.

You were never being measured by the acreage of your day, and the account you keep opening at four in the afternoon was not opened by God. Romans 8:1 says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the word now in that sentence is doing exactly what it looks like it is doing. The Holy Spirit is the One who takes that written line and puts it in the room with the accountant's voice, and the accountant does not have a reply to it.

What cannot be taken away from you

Look at the shape of what Jesus actually promises her. It is not that Mary will be rewarded. It is not that her stillness will be counted as work in some kinder ledger, which is what most of us secretly want: not freedom from the tally, just a gentler set of rules for it.

He says it shall not be taken away from her. Which means it was already hers, in her hands, on the floor, in the middle of the morning, with the dinner unmade and her sister furious in the doorway. She had it. The only thing He guarantees about it is that nobody is getting it off her.

That is the difference between being fed and being reassured. Reassurance says your quiet life is fine really. Feeding says here is a Person, in your hands, now, and He does not evaporate at four in the afternoon when you stop moving.

You have the good part right now, in a room the size it is, and the fire going down does not take it back off you. The written word says it shall not be taken away, which is not a prediction about your feelings, it is a statement about what God intends to do and not do. The Holy Spirit is the One who keeps it in your hands while you are dull, while you are reading the same paragraph three times, while a voice in the chair opposite is opening a book.

And the busyness would not have worked. This is worth saying plainly, because it is the hinge of the whole thing. A fuller day would not have answered the accountant. It would have given him more to read out. Anyone who has been genuinely busy for a season knows this: the voice does not stop at the end of a full day, it simply moves on to whether the full day was full of the right things.

This is yours: a Person you are already sitting with, and a verdict that closed before your day started. Psalm 23:1 says the Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want, and it opens with who He is rather than with what the sheep managed. The Holy Spirit is the One who makes that written line something you are inside of rather than something you are trying to feel.