It Would Not Keep

It was a Thursday in June and nothing about it had been arranged.

She ate supper on the back steps because the kitchen was hot, off a plate on her knees, the way you do when there is nobody to be tidy for. Her son called from three states away at about a quarter past seven and stayed on for forty minutes about nothing at all. The dog he should not have taken. A man at his work who says everything twice. The light went long across the yard and got into the top of the maple and stayed there.

After he hung up she did not go in. She sat with the empty plate on her knees and watched the swifts come over the roofline the way they do at that hour, and for something like an hour and a half she was not reaching for one single thing.

She noticed it while it was happening. That was the trouble, and it was not a mistake, and there was nothing else a person could have done.

The next morning she got out a notebook. She wrote down what she had eaten, which was nothing remarkable. She wrote down the hour and what the light had been doing and the thing he had said about the dog that made her laugh. She was not being silly about it. She was doing what any sensible person does with something good, which is try to find out where it is kept.

Friday she went back out at the same hour with the same plate. Friday was fine. Friday was nothing.

By Sunday she was angry, and by Wednesday she had a system: the same steps, the same hour, the phone turned face down on the boards beside her, the plate on her knees. And whatever it was she had been trying to catch had gone the way weather goes, without leaving a note and without any way of being sent for.

She quit in the second week of July. Put the notebook in the drawer with the batteries and the tape measure, and let it alone, and felt about it the way you feel about a thing you were foolish over.

Then on a Tuesday morning three weeks later, standing at the sink at six with her hands in the water and nothing prepared and no intention in her at all, it came back.

Ninety seconds, maybe. The window over the sink and the wet on her wrists and the whole of her, at rest, for about the length of a hymn verse.

And then it went.

She stood there with the water still running and thought, in about that many words: I cannot hold this and I cannot make it come, and I do not know what a person is supposed to do with a thing like that.

A certain rate every day

There is a whole nation in the sixteenth chapter of Exodus with the same problem, and God is the one who set it up that way.

Then said the LORD unto Moses, Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you; and the people shall go out and gather a certain rate every day, that I may prove them, whether they will walk in my law, or no.Exodus 16:4

Every day. That is in the instruction before anybody does anything wrong. A certain rate, every day, gathered fresh, out in the field, in the wet, with the dew still on it.

And you know what happened next because it is the part everybody quotes. Some of them kept it over until morning and it bred worms and it stank, and the tent smelled of it, and the whole camp knew.

That story gets preached as a rebuke for greed about as often as it gets preached at all, and read plainly it is not about greed and it never was. Nobody in a wilderness hoards out of appetite. You hoard out of fear. You hoard because you looked at the horizon and there was nothing on it, and the flakes came once and nobody swore an oath about tomorrow, and any creature with sense puts some by.

You were storing out of fear and not out of greed, and God has never once confused the two. I want that said flatly rather than implied. Exodus 16:4 sets the daily rate before a single person disobeys anything, which means the arrangement was never a trap laid for the grabby, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old written instruction out of a desert and reads it over a woman with a notebook in a drawer.

Look again at what she actually did, and be fair to her about it. She got something good and she tried to find out where it was kept. That is not a character flaw. That is the most reasonable response available to a person who has been hungry a long while and is not confident about tomorrow.

You have been given a portion for tonight, and it is not a smaller thing for being tonight's. His word calls the daily rate bread from heaven rather than a ration, and the Holy Spirit does not hand a person one evening while thinking less of them for wanting the week.

Why it was built to spoil

Here is the question almost nobody asks about the manna, and the answer is the best thing in the chapter.

Why would He make bread that will not keep? He is God. Bread that keeps is not beyond Him. He could have rained down a month of it on the first morning and let them stack it in the tents and gotten a great deal of complaining off His plate at one stroke.

He did not, and the reason is not thrift and it is not a lesson in discipline.

Bread that keeps makes the morning optional. If the tent is stacked to the roof, nobody goes out into the field at first light, and nobody stands in the wet grass, and nobody looks up. He built the perishability in because He intended to come back. The going out was as much the point as the eating, and it was not a chore He imposed on them, it was a standing appointment He made with Himself to be there.

It is of the LORD's mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not. They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness.Lamentations 3:22 and 23

New every morning. Not stored from a better morning. New, which is a word about Him and not about your capacity to hold things.

You are met by a God who has arranged to come back rather than one who handed out a supply and left. Lamentations 3:23 is written and it says the mercies are new every morning, and the Holy Spirit is the One who turns an old line about faithfulness into an ordinary Tuesday at a kitchen sink at six with the water running.

And now the thing this message will not do, because it is what every message like it does and it is why they leave people worse.

Nobody is handing you a practice. This is not a discipline, a rhythm, a routine or a habit to keep. You are not being asked to go out to the back steps at a set hour with the phone face down, and if you never manage anything of the kind, nothing is lost and nobody is disappointed. The showing up in this arrangement is His. He is the one who comes out to the field. You are simply somebody who was there when He did.

You are not being graded on how the evening goes, and there is no record being kept of the ones you missed. Exodus 16:4 puts the raining down on God and the gathering on ordinary tired people, and the Holy Spirit has never once handed anybody a scorecard along with the bread.