The Kitchen After Everyone Has Gone

The last car crunches off the gravel at twenty past eleven, and the hall belongs to her again.

Fifty years for her brother and his wife. She did the food, because she has done the food for this family since she was nineteen: the christenings, the two funerals, the wedding where it rained through the tent and nobody minded. Tonight it was ham and rice and peas, three trays of macaroni pie, and a table of cakes that hardly anybody got past.

Now it is foil and stacked trays and somebody's cardigan hanging over a chair. The urn ticks as it cools. Half a trifle sits under plastic wrap like it is waiting to be told what to do. Her sister-in-law kissed her at the door and said don't you dare wash up, we will come in the morning. She is washing up.

Scrape, stack, into the water. The tap running. It is her favorite part of any party and she has never told a living soul that.

Earlier, at the long table, her great-niece leaned over with icing on her chin and asked her, "Auntie, do you pray?" And she said, "Of course I do, baby." And it was true. And she got up to bring the cake in.

Now, with her hands in the water and the hall gone quiet behind her, the question comes back and sits down beside her. Not as guilt. More like the temperature changing in a room. She cannot tell you when she last said anything to God that was not said over other people's food.

There was no falling out. There was no morning she decided. She goes back over the years the way she goes back over a table, looking for the plate that somebody moved, and everything is where it should be. Nothing happened.

She dries her hands on the towel over her shoulder, puts the lights off one bank at a time, and locks the hall.

You know that kitchen. You would say the same thing to the child, and you would mean it. And there is a distance in you with no date on it, and lately the fact that it has no date has become the hardest part of it, because you have decided you cannot go back without one.

There is no date, and He never asked you for one

You are safe here, and we will go slowly, because this ache hides in a place most people never think to look. What I have to hand you is written down and it is older than both of us, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a written thing warm in a room.

You have been hunting for the day. Not because you enjoy going back over it, but because somewhere along the line you decided that an account is the thing that gets a person back in. Every return you have heard told well had a day in it. A night on the floor. A phone call. A room. Yours has none of that, so you have been standing at the sink of your own life turning the plates over, looking for the one that got moved, and there is nothing out of place, and the nothing has begun to feel like the verdict.

Hear me before we go one line further. You are not standing outside anything tonight, and the door you keep rehearsing your way toward was never shut against you. That is not my warmth talking. It is written in Jeremiah 31, and I will put the whole line in front of you in a moment, and it is the Holy Spirit who has kept this small unease alive in you long enough to bring you to a page about it.

A drift with no date is not a lesser kind of distance. It is the most ordinary kind there is. And God has never once, in the whole of His book, required a person to produce the day before He would come and get them.

What He said about the drawing

Here is the line, and I want you to take it slowly, because there is a small word in the middle of it doing all the work.

Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.Jeremiah 31:3

Therefore. The drawing comes out of the loving. Not out of the account. Not out of the day, the reason, the story, the thing you have been trying to remember since a child with icing on her chin asked a simple question. He loves, therefore He draws. The whole sentence runs one way, from Him toward you, and there is no clause anywhere in it that waits on your explanation. The Holy Spirit does not read that verse to you with a condition attached that God never wrote into it.

And look at the word drawn, because it is the word my old teachers loved. It is the word for hauling water up out of a well on a rope. It is the word for pulling a boat in on a line. It is a hand at the other end of something, taking in the slack, steady, while the boat does nothing at all except stay tied on.

You have been drawn, and the pull was never coming from your end of the rope. I am not putting my own idea over you there; that is Jeremiah 31:3 as it stands, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an ancient promise and makes it warm in a hall at midnight. The cord has been in His hand the whole time you were carrying trays.

That is why you cannot find the day. There is no day, because there was no snapping. There was a long, slow taking in of the slack that nobody was watching, and the boat is further in than it thinks.

The walk is shorter than the drift

Now the part that takes the size out of it.

The distance took a long time because it was made of small things and not one of them was a decision. The turn is not made the same way. A boat on a line does not row back across everything it drifted over. It only stops holding on to the dock. Turning is one movement, and it is small, and it happens with the mouth and not with the years.

So there is nothing to prepare. No summary. No date. No apology worked out on the drive over. Scripture never once shows God asking a person to file the account before He will come near, and any voice telling you that the therefore is yours to supply is not the voice of the One who wrote the verse.

You have His welcome tonight with nothing in your hands, and it is not something to be built back up over time. It is written into Jeremiah 31, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the kitchen while you read this. He did not need a reason then. He does not need one now.