I Slept While It Rose

It is twenty to eleven at night and she is making bread she does not need.

The kitchen is the only lit room in the house. October outside, the good part of October, when the storm windows are in but the furnace has not really started yet. There is a blue enamel bowl on the counter with a chip out of the rim near the handle, and she is turning dough over in it with the heel of her hand, hard, the way her grandmother did it, because she cannot sleep and this is what she does instead.

The reason she cannot sleep is a question somebody asked her at a table five hours ago.

It was the Wednesday group. Eight of them around Marilyn's dining room table with the leaf still in it from Easter, coffee going, a plate of those butter cookies from the store. And the woman leading it went around the circle and asked, kindly, with no trap in it at all: name one thing God has changed in you.

And they went around. And it came to her.

She said, "I guess I'm more patient than I used to be."

She heard it come out of her mouth. She heard the I guess. Twenty eight years of Sundays and Wednesdays, of casseroles carried to houses and nursery rotations and Bible studies with the workbook filled in, and when a kind woman asked her a soft question across a dining room table, what she had was I guess, and even that she was not sure about.

She drives home the long way, past the school.

So now it is twenty to eleven and there is dough in a blue bowl and it has been kneaded about four minutes longer than it needed. She covers it with a plate because she cannot find the dish towel she wanted. She turns off the light over the stove. She goes to bed.

And in the dark she thinks: twenty eight years, and the honest answer is I do not know. Not I do not want to say. I do not know. She lies there and tries to run the list anyway, and the list will not come, and somewhere around one in the morning she stops trying and sleeps.

At six she comes down for the coffee, in the same socks, and the plate is sitting up on a dome of risen dough, tilted, about to slide off the edge of the bowl.

It doubled. In the dark. In a cold kitchen, in a house with everybody asleep in it, while nobody watched and nobody helped and nobody checked on it once.

And here is the thing about that, and I think you already know where I am going, because you have been asked that question too and you had nothing ready either.

The question at the table was kind and it still took the wind out of you

I want to say something about that dining room first, because I have been at that table.

Nobody in that room meant any harm. The woman who asked is a good woman and the question is a good question, and eleven times out of twelve it is a lovely moment where somebody says something true and everybody is glad. The twelfth time it lands on a person who has walked with God for decades and cannot produce a sentence, and that person goes home and cannot sleep.

So let me say what this page is not, right at the front. Nothing here is going to grade the answer she gave. A short list is not a bad sign. A blank is not a bad sign. And nothing on this page is a verdict on whether you belong to Him, because that is not the question being asked here and it never was.

You are not required to produce an inventory in order to be somebody God is working on. Philippians 1 says the One who began a good work in you is the One who will perform it, and it is His Spirit doing the performing, so the evidence of it was never something He asked you to keep in a folder.

And the ache is real. Twenty eight years is a long time to give something, and wanting to see a difference is not vanity. It is the most natural thing in the world, and I would think less of a person who did not want it.

Hebrews 6 says God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and the Spirit keeps that written line true about actual casseroles and actual nursery rotations rather than about religion in general.

You were faithful in a thousand rooms nobody wrote down, and Wednesday night did not delete one of them.

He knoweth not how

Now, the bread. Because the bread is not a nice illustration, it is the mechanism, and Scripture beat me to it by about two thousand years.

So is the kingdom of God, as if a man should cast seed into the ground; and should sleep, and rise night and day, and the seed should spring and grow up, he knoweth not how.Mark 4:26-27

Read that middle clause again, the one everybody skips. He knoweth not how. That is not a failure of the farmer. It is not a gap in his training. It is written into the design. The man sleeps and rises and the growing goes on and he does not know how it works, and Jesus tells the story as good news.

You have been growing by a process you were never given access to, and that is by design rather than by accident. The written word puts the not-knowing into the parable on purpose, and the work underneath the soil is the Spirit's, so a person unable to describe it is exactly the person the parable is about.

And then there is the sentence your grandmother's Bible probably had underlined.

As thou knowest not what is the way of the spirit, nor how the bones do grow in the womb of her that is with child: even so thou knowest not the works of God who maketh all.Ecclesiastes 11:5

Bones. A body assembled in the dark, entirely, and the woman carrying it cannot watch a single minute of the work. She carries it and eats and sleeps and waits. Nobody has ever accused a pregnant woman of not trying hard enough because she could not describe the formation of a femur.

You are carrying something that has been assembling itself out of your sight, and the not-seeing is not evidence against it. Ecclesiastes 11 puts the works of God in the same sentence as the growing of bones, and it is His Spirit doing the making, which means the report you could not give on Wednesday was a report on your eyesight and not on the work.

The people at that table can see it and you cannot

Here is the strange mercy in how this is set up, and I have watched it a hundred times.

Nobody alive is worse placed to see the change than the person inside it. There is no before photograph, because the person was the photograph. The woman standing in her own kitchen at six in the morning is not a good witness to twenty eight years, and that is not a character flaw, it is a viewing angle.

But the people at that table are wonderful witnesses. Ask Marilyn sometime what she would say. She will not say what you would say. She will say something about how you are with her son. Or about a season when they all used to brace before they told you things, and how long it has been since anybody braced.

You have been watched with love by people who could name three things right now while you cannot name one. Proverbs 27 says iron sharpens iron and a friend sharpens the countenance of his friend, and the Spirit is what makes a friend's eyes useful rather than flattering, so what they can see is worth more than what you cannot.

And if the blank answer has stopped being a sore spot and turned into a verdict you read over your whole life at one in the morning, do not stay in that kitchen by yourself with it. A person arriving to help is God at work and not God being set aside. Start with a doctor: a body running low hands a woman conclusions about her soul that came out of her blood work. Then a counselor, who will take the whole twenty eight years instead of just Wednesday night. Then Marilyn, or somebody like her, and the unedited version. And if the dark hours have taken a turn toward wanting out of your own life, text 988 tonight, or reach the crisis line nearest you, and stay with someone until the light comes up over the sink.