Dinner On The Table Anyway

It went while Lorna was draining the pasta.

She could not have told you what it was. It was not a thought and it was not a feeling, exactly. She tipped the pot into the colander and the steam came straight up into her face the way it always does, and somewhere in the middle of that steam the last of whatever had been keeping her upright since about February quietly finished, and she stood at the sink holding a colander with both hands and did not move for maybe eight seconds.

Nothing had happened. That is what she kept coming back to later. It was a Thursday. Nobody had been unkind to her. She had gotten through work, gotten through the pharmacy, gotten through the thing with her mother's insurance, and none of it was dramatic, and then the steam came up and there was nothing there anymore.

She shook the colander. She put the pasta back in the pot. She got the sauce out from under the broiler where she had been keeping it warm and she carried the whole thing to the table, and she said what she always says, which is come and get it before it goes cold.

They came. Her husband Ted came in still talking about a problem with a truck at the yard, which he had been telling her about since Tuesday and which was genuinely interesting to him. Her son Kyle came in and took the last two pieces of garlic bread off the plate before he sat down, the way he has done since he was eleven and which she has decided is not a battle. Her daughter Marnie came in with her phone face down beside her plate, which is Marnie's version of good manners and Lorna has decided to accept it as such.

They ate. It was good. Somebody said the sauce was good and Lorna could not afterward remember who.

And nobody looked at her. Not in an unkind way. There was no coldness in that room, no argument, nobody sulking. They looked at each other and at their plates and at the truck story, and the whole meal moved along on its own, and the woman who had put it there sat at her own table and ate a plate of pasta and could not have told you a single thing about the taste of it.

Afterward she carried the trash bag out because the truck comes Friday. And she got as far as the can by the fence and she lifted the lid and she stopped, and she stood in her own back yard in the cold in her house shoes with the lid still in her hand, for four minutes, looking at the light coming out of her own kitchen window and the shapes of her own family moving around inside it.

She was not crying. She was not praying. She was not doing anything at all.

That verse was written to the empty on purpose

There is a line in Isaiah that people quote at tired women, and it is almost always quoted from the wrong end.

He giveth power to the faint; and to them that have no might he increaseth strength.Isaiah 40:29

Read who it is addressed to. The faint. Them that have no might. Not the strong who are running slightly low. Not the person who needs a second wind to finish something impressive. The recipients named in that sentence are people with nothing, and the qualification for the giving is the nothing.

Which means the eight seconds at the sink with the colander did not disqualify Lorna from that verse. It is the address on the envelope.

You are the exact person Isaiah 40:29 was written to, and being empty is what puts your name on it. That is not a consolation prize and it is not a nice way of putting it. The line names the faint out loud, and the Holy Spirit is what carries a sentence written to a whole exhausted nation down into one kitchen and hands it to one woman.

And notice what the verse does not do. It does not tell the faint to try harder, to manage themselves better, or to work out where they went wrong in February. There is no diagnosis in it anywhere. There is a description of who is out, and a statement about who gives.

Then look at what comes two verses later, because everybody knows the eagle line and almost nobody knows what it sits on top of. Even the youths shall faint and be weary, and the young men shall utterly fall. The strongest and freshest people available, and the text says flatly that they go down. Running out is not presented as a spiritual failure. It is presented as the ordinary condition of human beings, including the ones with the best legs in the country.

You have strength coming to you from outside yourself, and it is not a payment for holding out this long. 2 Corinthians 12:9 puts it in writing, strength made perfect in weakness, and the Spirit does not argue anybody into that line. He rests it on them, at a sink, on a Thursday.

You were never the fuel

Here is where the whole thing turns, and it turns on one small mistake almost everybody makes about light.

We talk about people running out as though a person were a candle: a fixed amount of wax, burning down, and when it is gone it is gone. Under that picture, a woman standing in her back yard in the cold is a candle at the end of its length, and the only question left is how much is underneath the wick.

But you are not the wax. That was never the arrangement.

You were never the fuel, which is why running low was never a failure of yours. John 15:5 settled which direction the sap runs, from the vine into the branch and never the other way, and what the Spirit adds is that it is running tonight, in a kitchen with the plates still on the table.

A branch that is not producing anything in November is not a failed branch. It is a branch in November. Nothing about it has come loose from the vine, nothing has been withdrawn, and if you cut it open you would find the same living thing inside it that was there in June. It is simply not the season for anybody to be able to see it, and the tree is not concerned about that in the slightest.

So let me say plainly the thing this category exists to say. The empty season is not a dimming. Sleeping ten hours on Saturday is not a dimming. Sitting in the car for six minutes in the parking lot before you go in is not a dimming. And I will not promise you a date when the feeling comes back, because nobody can put a timetable on God and the ones who try do damage.

What I can hand you is what is written.

This is yours, and resting does not turn it down by one degree. Psalm 121:4 says He does not slumber, which has been in the written record for three thousand years, and the same Spirit who breathed it is the reason it lands on a woman in house shoes by a fence instead of staying a general truth about God.