The Jar On The Back Shelf

There are jars on the back shelf of that pantry that have outlived the people they were made for.

Not in a morbid way. She would tell you plainly that a jar does not know anything. It is only that when somebody in that valley dies, she cooks, and she has been doing it a long time, and the shelf keeps the ones nobody came for.

Twenty years. Ham and pies and the potato thing that everybody asks for and she has never written down. She takes it to the house, she puts it in the fridge, she makes tea for whoever is sitting there, and she does not stay long because staying long is not the gift.

Everybody in that valley knows what she does. Nobody has ever thanked her properly, and she would be mortified if they tried.

Here is what happened in March.

She was in her own kitchen at half five in the morning with the oven on, doing what she has done a hundred times, for a man she had known her whole life. And she noticed, quite calmly, that she was thinking about whether the car needed diesel.

That was all. She was not upset. She was not moved. She was not anything.

She got the food to the house and made the tea and came home, and it was a perfectly good job of work, and afterwards she sat in the car outside her own gate for a while.

Because the thing she used to feel while she cooked was not there.

She has not told anybody. She would not know how to start, and she is frightened that it says something about her that she does not want to hear.

If you know that quiet, come in and sit down. Nobody is going to ask you to look inside yourself.

Numbness is not a verdict

I want to say the first thing very plainly, because a woman sitting in a car outside her own gate has usually already reached a conclusion about herself, and it is usually the wrong one.

A thing gone quiet inside you is not evidence that you have gone wrong.

Far more often it is evidence that you have been used. Twenty years of half five in the morning is a long time for anybody. Skin does this. Hands that do the same work for decades go hard on the outside so the work can carry on, and nobody looks at a farmer's palms and reads them as a moral failing.

Hearts do something similar, and Scripture treats it as a condition to be healed rather than a crime to be answered.

And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.Ezekiel 36:26

Read whose verbs those are. I will give. I will put. I will remove. Every single one of them belongs to God, and the person in that verse is not asked to soften themselves first.

You are being dealt with as somebody to be given a new heart, and you are not being tried for the old one. Ezekiel 36:26 puts the whole transaction in God's hands, and the very next verse names His Spirit put within you as the one who does it, which means what you felt in your car is a thing He heals rather than a thing He holds against you.

Guarding your heart is not the same as inspecting it

Now the second thing, and it is the one that keeps a tired woman out of a trap.

Proverbs says to keep your heart with all vigilance, because from it flow the springs of life, and nearly everybody reads 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 a valuable thing, 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 entire job.

You are not being asked to audit yourself, and you were never asked to. 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 twenty years of half five in the morning did not require a single self examination to stay good work.

So we are not going to look through you tonight. We are going to do one small thing instead, and it is not a resolution, because a resolution made in a kitchen at the end of a hard season is just one more weight and you carry enough.

You are going to hand one thing over.

You have somewhere to put this, and you are allowed to put it there today. 1 Peter 5:7 says to cast your anxiety on Him because He cares for you, and it is His Spirit who makes that an actual transaction rather than a nice thought, so the quiet you found in the car has an address and it is not your own chest.

And under it all, the thing this site will not run without: God is the one keeping your heart while you keep watch over it. You have not been left standing guard over yourself in an empty pantry.