The Drawer That Would Not Shut

The drawer in that kitchen has not shut properly since the spring.

Not broken. It shuts. You just have to lift it slightly at the front and give it a push, and everybody in the house does that now without thinking about it, including the neighbor who comes in to feed the cat.

She noticed it the first week. She thought, I must get that seen to. And then she lifted it and pushed it, and it shut, and life carried on.

That is not the thing I want to tell you about. That is only the picture.

The thing is this. On a Tuesday evening in the same kitchen she sat down with a plate of something she had made for one, and she picked up her fork, and halfway to her mouth a small thought arrived and sat down opposite her.

I do not say grace any more when I am on my own.

She could not tell you when it stopped. She says it at Christmas. She says it when her son and his family come, because he expects it and because she likes doing it. But on the ordinary evenings, alone, with the radio on, somewhere in the last year or so it quietly went, and she never once decided against it, and no evening was the evening she stopped.

She sat there for a moment with the fork in the air, and then she thought the thing that most of us think.

That is far too small to make a fuss about.

And she ate her dinner. And it stayed with her all the same.

If you have a fork in the air somewhere in your week, come and sit down here. This is not going to turn into an inventory.

The noticing was not an accusation

I want to deal with the first thing straight away, because if I do not, everything after it will land wrong.

You have probably assumed, quietly, that the small voice pointing at that one thing is a complaint. That somebody upstairs is disappointed. That the thought arrived because you are in trouble and have not been told yet.

Look at what David actually asks for.

Search me, O God, and know my heart. Try me and know my thoughts.Psalm 139:23

That is a request. A man asking to be looked at. And he asks it at the end of a psalm about being known so completely and so tenderly that he cannot find the edge of it: hemmed in behind and before, a hand laid on him, darkness and light the same to the One looking. He is not inviting an inspection. He is inviting the attention of somebody who has never once looked at him unkindly.

You were shown that one small thing early, and you were shown it gently, and both of those facts are on purpose. Psalm 139 puts the searching inside the same breath as the hemming in, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the showing, which is why what arrived at your table was one sentence and not a list. An accusation would have brought the whole file. It brought one thing.

He stopped at one, and you should too

Here is something worth noticing about the moment you had.

You did not get a summary of your spiritual condition. You did not get a year in review. You got a single, specific, slightly awkward sentence about grace at your own table, and then it was quiet.

That restraint is the fingerprint. You have been dealt with kindly here, and you are not being audited. Romans 2:4 says it is the kindness of God that leads to repentance, and it is His Spirit who carries that kindness at exactly the temperature a person can receive, which is why nothing about that Tuesday felt like an alarm going off.

So do not do the thing you are about to do. Do not go looking for the other four.

A person who has been shown one thing and immediately begins hunting for the rest has swapped a kindness for a project, and the project always ends the same way: a tired list, a heavy heart, and nothing actually put back. The one thing was the whole message. Deal with the one thing.

And the reason you can afford to be this calm about it is the second half, which nobody tells you.

You are being kept while you keep watch, and the watching was never resting on your eyesight. Philippians 1:6 says the One who began a good work in you is the one carrying it on to completion, and it is His Spirit who noticed a fork in the air and mentioned it, because you were never the one responsible for spotting everything.