It Was Smaller Than I Thought

The box was on the front room floor for four hours before she opened it, which she has decided not to tell anybody about.

She had carried it in from the step at half past nine and set it down and then gone and done other things. She wiped a counter that was clean. She answered two messages that did not need answering that morning. Ten years of work were sitting in a cardboard box in the middle of her rug and she went and dealt with a drawer.

When she finally knelt down and cut the tape, the sound of it was very loud in an empty house.

Packing paper. More packing paper than seemed necessary. And then the corner of it, and then the whole of it, in her two hands, in the light coming through the front window at about half past one on an ordinary Thursday.

It was smaller than she thought.

That is the sentence, and there is no better one. Not worse. Not disappointing, exactly, not in any way she could have justified to a person standing next to her. It was good. It was exactly what she had worked for and it had come out well and people she respected had already said kind and specific things about it. It simply sat in her hands at a size, an actual physical size, that had nothing whatsoever to do with the size it had been for ten years inside her chest.

She turned it over. She looked at the back of it. She set it on the arm of the chair and stood a little way off and looked at it there, the way you look at a picture you have just hung, and it stayed the same size.

And she waited for the thing to happen.

She had never told anybody there was a thing supposed to happen, because saying it out loud would have made it sound childish, and she is thirty-eight years old and not a childish person. But there had been a thing, some arrival, some settling, some moment when the whole ten years would land in her at once and she would finally be, in a way she could not have defined, all right.

She stood in her front room at one in the afternoon with the tea going cold on the sill and the box open on the rug, and she was exactly as all right as she had been at nine.

Then came the second wave, which is the one that actually hurt. Not that it was small. That she had aimed at it. Ten years, every Saturday, every early morning, every conversation she left in order to go and work on it, and the thing she had aimed them all at turned out to be a good, ordinary object that fits in two hands.

She did not say any of this to anyone. She put the packing paper back in the box, which is a thing she still cannot explain, and she went to work.

Nobody Aimed Wrong Here

I want to get one thing out of the road first, because it is standing between you and everything else on this page, and it is heavy.

Nothing about the aiming was foolish. Not one Saturday of it. It was good work, and wanting it was good wanting, and the ten years were not a misunderstanding you are now supposed to feel wise about. If somebody has already told you the moral of this story, and the moral was that you should have wanted something better, you can put that down. It is not what happened, and it is not what I am going to do with your afternoon.

What actually happened is much simpler and much less humiliating. You are a person whose reach turns out to be bigger than anything you can carry in two hands, and that is a fact about how you were made rather than a fault in what you chose. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says He has set eternity in the human heart, which is written about everybody in every century, and the Holy Spirit is the One who lets that sentence land in a front room at one in the afternoon without it sounding like a rebuke.

Think about what that means for a moment. If there is genuinely something eternal set inside you, then an ordinary sized object will be an ordinary sized object no matter how much of your life you aimed at it. That is not the object failing. A cup does not fail by holding a cupful.

So the disappointment is not evidence that you were shallow. It is a measurement of your capacity, taken accidentally, in your own front room, and it came back larger than you expected.

You have a capacity that ten years of good work could not fill, and it was there before you started and it is not a wound. That is what is written, and it is written about the human heart in general and not about your particular Thursday, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a general line and makes it particular in the chest of somebody standing next to an open box.

The Food That Does Not Run Out

Now hear something Jesus said, and hear who He said it to, because the audience is half the meaning.

He had fed a crowd out of almost nothing the day before. They ate until they were full. Then they got up the next morning, still hungry the way people are, and went around the lake looking for Him, and He did not scold them for coming back. He named what was happening.

Labour not for the meat which perisheth, but for that meat which endureth unto everlasting life, which the Son of man shall give unto you.John 6:27

That is not a lecture about greed. Read it again. He is not saying their hunger the next morning was disgraceful, and He is not saying bread is bad, and He had just made a great deal of bread on purpose. He is naming two categories of food. One kind is real and good and runs out. The other kind is real and good and does not. And then, crucially, He does not tell them to go and want less of the first one. He tells them who hands out the second one, and then He hands it out.

You are not being corrected in that sentence, and you were never the person in it doing something wrong. John 6:27 puts the giving on the Son of Man's side and leaves the hunger exactly where it is, and the Holy Spirit is the One who keeps that distinction from collapsing back into a scolding somewhere between the page and your ribs.

Here is the thing about perishing food, and it is not an insult to the food. It perishes. That is its nature and it is not a moral failing in a loaf. Ten years of good work produced an honest, ordinary, perishing sized good thing, exactly as it was always going to, and the whole time you were making it you were also being made hungrier, because that is what long work does to a person.

You have been carrying a hunger that was always aimed past the thing, and the ache in your front room is the aim correcting itself. The written word says there is meat that endures, present tense, already existing, already being handed out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who walks a person from the box on the rug to the table where that is served.