Not Anything In the House

The kitchen is two strides wide and she can wipe the whole counter without moving her feet.

There is a kettle. There is a tin with tea in it and a tin beside it with nothing in it, which she keeps because it has a good lid and a good lid is a good lid. Two mugs on the shelf, and the one with the chipped handle is hers, because that is how it works. A pan. A wooden spoon that was her mother's before it was hers, worn flat on one side from forty years of the same hand.

Her mother is in the front room. Four years now, in the chair by the window, and on the good mornings she knows who is bringing the tea, and on the other mornings she is very polite to a stranger, which is the harder one, though it took two years to learn that.

The week has a shape and the shape does not move. Half past six. The little box with the days marked on it. Seven o'clock and the tea. Nine, and eleven, and one. The same eleven feet of hallway forty times a day. On Thursday somebody comes for two hours, and she walks to the end of the road and back and stands at the corner a while before she comes home, because two hours is not long enough to go anywhere and be easy in your mind about it.

A woman from the church came by in March. Kind, and meaning every word of it, and she asked the question that people ask, which is what do you do for yourself, and she got the answer that question always gets, which is not one worth anything.

Then, on the step, with her keys already out, she asked a better one without knowing it was better.

She said: what have you got in the house? Tell me and I will bring you whatever you are short of.

And the woman stood in her own doorway and heard her own voice say, with no thinking in it at all: nothing. There is nothing in the house.

It was not true. There was tea in the tin. There was half a loaf and there was the pan and there was a chair by a window that gets the sun from ten until about half past one, which is the best thing in that house and everybody who sits in it says so. There was a hymn she hums in the hallway without knowing she is humming it, the same one, forty times a day, along the same eleven feet.

But nothing is what came out, and it came out fast, the way a thing comes out when a person has been saying it to herself for a long time without moving her lips.

She shut the door and stood in the two stride kitchen and put the kettle on for the seven o'clock that had already happened, and then stood there a while with her hand flat on the cold side of it.

The question, and what it was not

There is a woman in the fourth chapter of Second Kings who gets asked the same thing, on a worse day, and her answer is one of the most human sentences in the whole book.

And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for thee? tell me, what hast thou in the house? And she said, Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil.2 Kings 4:2

The trouble that brought her to the prophet is its own subject and it belongs on somebody else's page. What belongs here is the exchange itself, and the exchange is remarkable before anything else happens.

He asks what is in the house. He does not send out. He does not go around her to somewhere better stocked. The first move God makes through that man is to ask a woman with nothing to take an inventory of a house she has already written off.

And listen to her answer, because it contradicts itself inside a single breath. Not any thing in the house. Save a pot of oil.

Both halves are honest. That is exactly how a person under a long load counts. Nothing. Except. The nothing comes first because the nothing is what she has been rehearsing, and the except comes second because it is actually there and she is not a liar, she is only tired.

You are not a reliable witness against your own house, and that is mercy and not an accusation. I mean it as a relief rather than a correction. 2 Kings 4:2 puts the words not any thing and save a pot of oil in the same sentence out of the same mouth, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes an old written inventory and reads it back to a woman standing in a doorway with somebody's keys jingling on the step.

You have a pot of oil, and the word save in that verse is not a technicality. His word did not record her nothing and leave it there. It recorded the exception, kept it, and built everything that followed on it, and the Holy Spirit has never once agreed with your accounting on the days when it came out fast.

He fills what is already standing there

What happens next in that chapter is worth reading slowly, because it is not the shape anybody expects.

He does not hand her something from outside. He tells her to gather vessels. Empty ones. Not a few. From everywhere she can reach. Then to shut the door, with her sons inside and the road outside, and pour from the little she already had into everything she had gathered.

And it came to pass, when the vessels were full, that she said unto her son, Bring me yet a vessel. And he said unto her, There is not a vessel more. And the oil stayed.2 Kings 4:6

Read the last four words and let them stand. The oil stayed. It did not run out. It stopped because there was nothing left to pour into, and not one second before that. The limit in that story was never on the supply side.

You were never short of what fills a life, and what looked like a shortage was a shortage of open vessels. 2 Kings 4:6 says the oil stayed when the vessels ran out, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a written line about a shut door in a small house and lays it over a two stride kitchen at seven in the morning.

And here is a thing that needs saying plainly, because a great deal of writing on small lives is written by people whose lives are small on purpose. Some lives are small because somebody chose it. A great many are small because illness came, or because a person you love needs you in the chair by the window, or because something happened that closed the walls in without asking. Nobody is being told those walls are a blessing in disguise, and nobody is being graded on the size of the floor. God is not measuring square footage. He is asking what is in the house, and then He is shutting the door and filling it.

You are living in a house God has said He fills, and He said it about the small one and not about a bigger one you were supposed to have gotten by now. Scripture puts the miracle inside a closed door in a poor room, and the Holy Spirit did not need a larger house to do it in then and does not need one now.