The Pot That Outgrew The Window

There is a plant on her windowsill that has been in the same pot since her son was at school and he is thirty one.

It is alive. It flowers. It is, by any reasonable measure, doing fine, and she waters it and feeds it and turns it and would be upset if anything happened to it.

She has never repotted it. She has never once taken it out and looked at the roots.

Here is the other thing, and the plant is only the picture.

She feeds people. That is what she does and it is what she is for and she has never wanted to do anything else. Women in that church bring her things at eleven at night. She runs two groups. She is the one people ring when a diagnosis comes.

And a few weeks ago somebody new asked her, quite innocently, who feeds her.

She laughed and said something light and moved the conversation on, which is a thing she is extremely good at.

And then she went home and sat in the car outside her own house and worked out that the honest answer is nobody, and that it has been nobody for about eight years, and that at some point she had quietly decided that this is simply what happens when you are the one who gives.

Not with any bitterness. She is not resentful and she would not swap it.

It is that she looked at eight years and could not find a single meal she had sat down to.

If nobody has put anything in front of you in a long time, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to ask you to do more.

He asks about food, not effort

There is a line in Isaiah that lands on a person like a hand on the shoulder rather than a finger in the chest.

Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labour for that which does not satisfy? Listen diligently to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.Isaiah 55:2

Notice what He does not say. He does not say you have not been working. He assumes the labor, He assumes the spending, and He asks an entirely different question, which is what any of it is feeding.

That is a question about food, and it is asked kindly, and there is not a word of reproach anywhere near it.

And look at what is offered at the end of the sentence. Not sufficiency. Not getting your intake back to an acceptable level. Rich food. Delight.

You are being invited to eat rather than told to work, and the invitation is open tonight. Isaiah 55:2 puts good food in front of a laboring person without one word of criticism, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the written word taste like anything at all, which means what you need is not more capacity, it is a meal.

Nobody decided that givers do not eat

Now let me name the conclusion you reached in that car, because it has been running your life for eight years and nobody has ever said it out loud to you.

You decided that not being fed is simply what happens when you are the one who feeds.

That is not in Scripture anywhere. Paul, who fed more people than anybody, writes constantly about wanting to see people so that he may be encouraged by them, and he says it in that direction, plainly, without embarrassment. Jesus went off on His own to be with the Father in the middle of the busiest ministry that has ever existed, and nobody in the Gospels treats that as a weakness in Him.

And there is nothing about your eight years that is wasted or wrong. You have fed a great many people out of what you were given and it has been real food, and the fact that it has lasted this long says something about how deeply it went in when it went in. Nobody is calling those years a mistake.

But a woman who has not been fed in eight years is not a woman with a character flaw. She is a woman who is hungry, and hungry is a condition rather than a failing.

You have not hit a ceiling, and there is no point at which the feeding was supposed to stop for you. Colossians 2:7 speaks of being rooted and built up in Him, both of them ongoing rather than finished, and it is the Spirit who does the building, so being the one who gives was never a reason for the growing to end.

Here is the whole of the offer and it is smaller than you fear. Not a mentor, not a group, not somebody to look after you, which would be one more thing to arrange. One passage, slowly, out loud, on your own, with nobody to hand it on to afterwards.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Isaiah 55:11 says His word does not return empty but accomplishes what He purposes, and it is His Spirit who carries it in, which is why one slow reading with nobody waiting for it can be a meal.

And under all of it: God is the one keeping you while you keep what He gave you. The root is not your achievement. It is where He planted you, and the pot was always allowed to change.