The Answer She Gives Without Listening

The question is always the same and it always arrives at roughly the same hour.

Have you fed the cat.

There is no cat. There has not been a cat for eleven years. The cat is buried under the apple tree and everybody in this story knows that except the person asking.

Four years of this. She goes round every day. She does the tablets and the shopping and the bins and the small ridiculous things that turn out to be the whole of it, like finding the remote and pretending not to have found it too quickly.

And every day, somewhere in the afternoon, the cat.

For a long time she was rather proud of how she handled it. She never corrected her. She would say something warm and slightly silly and they would move on and it cost nothing.

Here is what happened three weeks ago.

Her mother got about four words in. Have you fed the.

And she heard her own voice deliver the whole answer, warm and lovely and complete, before the sentence had finished.

She had not listened. She had not been there at all. She had produced the correct sound out of a machine that has been running for four years.

Her mother did not notice. Her mother was perfectly happy. That is somehow the worst part.

She has told nobody. What would she even say, and to whom, and what would it sound like.

If you have heard yourself do something like that, come and sit in the garden. Nobody is going to ask you to look inside yourself.

A reflex is not the same as a hard heart

Let me deal with the verdict first, because you passed it on yourself three weeks ago and it has been standing ever since.

What you heard in that kitchen is not evidence that you have stopped loving her.

It is evidence that a human being has done the same act about fifteen hundred times.

That is what bodies do. A hand that makes the same movement long enough begins to make it slightly ahead of the decision, and nobody calls a pianist insincere for it. Warmth given daily for four years to somebody who cannot remember receiving it yesterday will eventually run partly on its own, because a person cannot generate fresh feeling on demand fifteen hundred times, and Scripture has never once asked anybody to.

You are not being tried for what happened in that kitchen, and you were never on trial. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, and it is the Holy Spirit who is called the Helper precisely because the help was always going to be needed, which means the reflex you heard is a thing God understands rather than a charge He files.

Guarding your heart is protection, not inspection

Now the second thing, and it keeps a tired woman out of a trap she is standing right beside.

Proverbs says keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life, and nearly everybody hears that as an instruction to go inside and look for faults.

It is not. The word is a guarding word, the sort you use about something valuable, and the picture in the same breath is a spring in the ground. You do not stand over a spring with a clipboard. You keep the leaves out of it and you do not let anybody build on top of it. That is the job.

You are not being asked to audit yourself, and you never were. Proverbs 4:23 hands you a spring to protect rather than a self to interrogate, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the protecting from the inside, which is why four years of tablets and bins have not once required a self examination to stay love.

So we are not going in there this afternoon. No inventory. No working out when it started. This site does not hand anybody a self audit.

You are going to hand one thing over, and that is the whole move.

Casting all your anxieties on Him, because He cares for you.1 Peter 5:7

Read the division of labor there. The casting is yours. The caring is His. You are not asked to resolve the thing, understand it, or promise anything about next week. You are asked to throw it, and He does the rest.

You have somewhere to put this, and you are allowed to put it there today. 1 Peter 5:7 makes the casting a real transaction rather than a feeling, and it is His Spirit who carries it across, so the thing you heard in your own voice has an address and it is not your own chest.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping your heart while you keep watch over it, and He has been keeping it every one of those afternoons. You have not been standing guard over yourself alone in your mother's kitchen.