The One At The Sink

The water has gone gray and there are still fourteen plates.

Tomás runs the hot tap again and the steam climbs the window over the sink, so the yard outside disappears in stages. The lemon tree goes first. Then the fence. Then the neighbor's roof, and after that there is nothing out there at all except a soft orange square where the sun is.

Behind him the house is loud. Somebody is telling the story about the flat tire outside Bakersfield again, the one that gets a little bigger every year, and his sister Yolanda is doing all the voices, including the tow truck driver, and the front room goes up like a firework.

He knows the voices. He could do them himself. He is not doing them. He is scraping rice off the big serving dish with the edge of a spoon, because the sponge will not touch baked rice and never has.

His mother comes in for more coffee, pats him twice on the shoulder blade, and goes back out. A nephew brings in one more glass and sets it down about eight inches from the sink, which is the distance this family has always considered helpful. Somebody laughs so hard that a chair scrapes.

Yolanda leans in the doorway with her cup. "Are you coming?"

"In a minute."

"You always say in a minute."

"Then in two minutes."

She laughs and goes back to her audience, and the kitchen is quiet again except for the water. He stacks the plates the way his father used to stack them, biggest on the bottom, and he thinks the thought he has been thinking for about nineteen years and has never once said in a room with people in it.

In this family, Yolanda is the light. I am the one at the sink.

It is not self pity. He would be embarrassed if you called it that. It is closer to arithmetic. She is the one who fills a room. She is the one who prays out loud at the table when the aunt asks. She is the one people come to the house for.

He is the one who noticed the ice ran out. He is the one who moved the car so his uncle could get out. He is the one who went into the garage for the extra chair and wiped the dust off the seat with his sleeve on the way in, so that nobody would have to see it.

Nineteen years of two minutes.

The water is going cold again. He runs the hot, and the steam climbs the glass, and the yard disappears one more time.

Look at who did the moving

There is a sentence about you in the New Testament that was written down long before anybody in your family had an opinion about you, and there is nothing in it for you to do.

Paul is writing to believers in a small town called Colossae, people with jobs and relatives and Sunday afternoons, and he tells them what has already happened to them. God rescued them out of the dominion of darkness. God brought them into the kingdom of the Son He loves.

Look at the verbs. Rescued. Brought. Both of them past tense. Both of them done by God to a person, while that person was somewhere ordinary, quite possibly in a kitchen with their hands in the water.

You are in the kingdom of the Son God loves this afternoon, and you were in it before the plates were ever stacked. I am not telling you that to cheer you up. Colossians 1:13 has the verbs finished already, it is written and it stands, and the Spirit is what takes a written line like that and rests it in a man standing over a sink.

He has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins.Colossians 1:13-14

Notice what is missing from that sentence. There is no audition in it. Nobody in Colossae volunteered for the transfer, nobody qualified for it by being the one the family gathers around, and nobody in the verse is being graded on how they have been getting on with it since.

You have been moved, and you did not carry yourself across. That is the entire grammar of Colossians 1:13, a transfer done to a person rather than by one, and the Holy Spirit does not argue anybody into that; He seats them in it, usually somewhere unimpressive, usually on an ordinary day.

The kitchen is inside the kingdom

Years before Paul wrote that letter, Jesus sat down on a hillside in front of a crowd who had walked in from their villages that morning. Fishermen. Farmers. Mothers with children on their hips. Not one of them had done a thing about it yet, and He told them plainly that they were the light of the world.

He said it first. He said it over all of them at once. He did not say become, and He did not say try harder, and He did not say that the ones near the front were managing it better than the rest.

You are the light of the world at that sink, and the room you are standing in does not get a vote on it. Matthew 5:14 said it first, in the plain present tense, over people with no platform and no reputation. The Spirit says it again, today, in the room with the steam on the window.

And here is what nobody in that house has ever actually done. Nobody held a vote. Nobody counted. There was never a meeting where the family sat down, ranked its members, and put one at the front and one at the sink. Yolanda has no idea she is carrying a title. The ranking happened in exactly one place, quietly, over about nineteen years, and it was never God's ranking.

His ranking is in the letter, and it puts every rescued person in the same kingdom, under the same Son, lit by the same light, with no back row anywhere in it.

You were transferred by God Himself, and no seating plan in that house overturns it. The written word puts the rescuing and the bringing in His hands from beginning to end, and His Spirit is not waiting for the front room to agree before He calls you what He calls you.