A Bag With a Hole In It

The can leaks along the bottom seam, and he knows it leaks, and he carries it anyway from the barrel at the top of the field down to the last row, and by the time he gets there a third of it has gone into the grass behind him.

He has walked that line so many times you can see it. A darker stripe in the dirt, straight down the slope, the shape of everything he has carried and not delivered. He could solder the seam. He has said so out loud, to nobody, for two summers.

But that is not the thing. The thing happens at the gate, at the end of the day, and it happened again this evening.

It was a good day. Genuinely. He can list it, and he does, standing at the gate with the empty can hanging off two fingers and the sun going flat and gold along the rows. His daughter came down the track at four with a jug and stood swinging on the gate the way she has since she was small, and she told him something funny somebody had said, and she laughed at her own telling of it before she got to the end. The rows at the top are up and green and the wind has not knocked them. A man he barely knows leaned over the fence in the afternoon and said the field looked well, and meant it, and walked on. He got the far end done, which he had not expected to.

Four good things. He can count them on his hand. And he is standing at the gate with the sun going down and he cannot feel a single one of them.

That is what he cannot say to anybody, and it is why he stands at the gate longer than he needs to. Not that the day was bad. That the day was good and it has run out. It came in over the top of him all afternoon, real and warm and actually given, and somewhere between four o'clock and now it went out through the bottom of him the way the water goes out through the seam, and by the time he reaches the gate he is carrying an empty can and a day he cannot taste.

And he has started to draw a conclusion about himself, which is the part that worries me. Not that the day leaked. That he is the leak. That there is something in the make of him that will not hold good things, that other people fill up and stay full and he is the one who has to be topped up hourly like a can with a bad seam, and that this is a fault in his character which he has failed for years to solder.

Maybe you are standing at your own gate this evening with that same conclusion in your hand. It was a good day. You could name four things. And they are gone, and you are empty, and you have quietly decided the problem is you.

The prophet describes it and does not scold it

There is a line in the prophets that has your evening in it, and the first thing to see is the tone of it, because if you hear the wrong tone you will hear a telling off where there is not one.

Ye have sown much, and bring in little; ye eat, but ye have not enough; ye drink, but ye are not filled with drink; ye clothe you, but there is none warm.Haggai 1:6

Read it again slowly. Nobody in that sentence is being called greedy. Nobody is being told the sowing was foolish or the eating was too much. The prophet is doing something far kinder and far more useful than correction. He is describing. He is saying out loud, in the plain order it happens: it went in, and it did not stay, and you are still hungry, and you are not imagining it.

And the picture he lands on at the end of that verse is a bag with a hole in it. Not a hole in the man. A hole in the bag. Everything he carries home is real and good and gets put somewhere that does not hold.

You were never the leak, and the good that came to you today was not wasted on you. I am not softening this to spare you. Haggai 1:6 puts the not having enough in the plainest possible words without a single line of blame attached, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries a prophet's honest description into a man standing at a gate with an empty can, so that he hears an accurate account of his evening instead of a verdict on his character.

Now hold your four good things beside that. Your daughter on the gate. The field looking well. The far end done. They were not less than you thought. They arrived exactly as good as they felt at four o'clock. What happened is that they went into a container that was never made to hold a whole person's hunger, and by dusk the level was down, and it will be down again tomorrow, and none of that is a report card on you.

You are carrying a hunger that runs deeper than any single good day can fill, and that depth is not a defect in you. It is written in Haggai 1:6 that a person can eat and still not have enough, and the Spirit is the One who takes an old line about eating and drinking and sets it down beside a good day that ran out at sundown, so a man can stop calling himself a bad container.

What you were actually hungry for

Here is the second thing, and it is the whole reason this page exists, so let me put it down without decorating it.

You have been trying to name what is missing by going back over the day, item by item, looking for the one that should have worked. That is the wrong direction. The hunger under your evening does not have the name of any of those four things. It has a Person's name, and He said it out loud about Himself.

I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.John 6:35

He does not say the bread of life is a principle or a practice. He says I am. He puts His own name in the place where you have been putting the day, the field, the good word over the fence, the hour when your daughter was laughing on the gate. Those were good. He is the bread. There is no competition between the two and nobody is asking you to give up one for the other.

You have a hunger that is aimed at a Person, and naming it out loud is not a confession of greed. John 6:35 has Him saying I am the bread of life, in the first person, to a crowd who had eaten that same week and were hungry again by morning, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes a name in a written sentence land in somebody's actual mouth at dusk at the edge of a field.

And here is what naming does, which is more than you would expect from a name. The moment you can say what the hunger is for, you stop bringing the day up on charges. You stop asking your daughter's laugh to be bread. You stop asking a good afternoon to do the work of a Person, which it was never able to do and was never asked to do, and which you have been silently blaming yourself for all summer.

You are eating tonight from a bread that is still there at breakfast, and it does not run out through the seam. He said in John 6 that whoever comes to Him shall not hunger, and the Spirit is the One who takes that from a page into a man's own evening, so the good things of a good day get to be good things and not a failed meal.