The Box Came, and It Was Not the Thing

The box came on a Tuesday, and the whole house heard the van.

Her son got to the door first. Her husband came out of the back room with his glasses pushed up on his head, and her mother, who was staying that week, appeared at the top of the stairs saying "is that it? is that it?" the way you would ask about a baby being carried in from the car. So the box got opened right there in the hallway, four people standing round it, because nobody could wait for the kitchen. She cut the tape with the bread knife because it was the nearest thing to hand. She lifted the first copy out, and there it was. Her name. On a spine. In a typeface somebody else had chosen. Twenty-two years after she first said out loud, at a school desk, that this was what she wanted to be.

Everybody cheered. Her mother cried. Her son took a photo of her holding it up in front of her face like a shield, and it is a lovely photo, everybody says so.

And here is the thing she has not told a single one of them. The following Sunday, standing at the sink with the book propped on the windowsill where she had put it so she could see it while she washed up, she felt the old reaching start again. In the exact place it had always been. Not for another book. She could not have told you what for. Just the reaching, the same one that had aimed twenty-two years at a spine and a name, awake again and looking about for the next thing to aim at, as if nothing had arrived at all.

You know that Sunday. Maybe yours was not a book. Maybe it was the letters after your name, or the finish line, or the key to your own front door, or the morning the papers finally went through and you had the thing, the actual thing, that you had aimed your whole life at. And it came! And you stood in your hallway with everybody cheering and it was lovely. And a week later, at your own sink, the wanting was up and dressed before you were.

The reaching did not fail

Let me say the low thing first, because you've been standing in it for a week and nobody has said it out loud. It feels like ingratitude. That is the pit. You got the thing. People who love you cried in a hallway over it. And there you stand at a sink with it on the windowsill, hungry again, and the hunger feels like an accusation: twenty-two years, and it was not even the thing, and what kind of person gets what they aimed at and wants within the week? And the wondering has started: whether something is wrong with you at the root.

Nothing is wrong with you at the root. Listen to what Jesus said to a woman at a well, in the heat of the day, when she came out with a jar for the same water she had come out for every day of her life.

Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again.John 4:13-14

Hear the tone of it. He is not scolding her for being thirsty. Thirst is not the fault. He is telling her something about the well: that it was always going to be like this, that a well is a well and it never once pretended to be more, and the reaching that brings a person back to it every day is not greed. It is aim. It is a hunger looking for its home.

You are not greedy, and you are not broken. You are thirsty at a well that was only ever a well, and that is a completely honest thing to be. I am not speaking my own comfort over you there. That is what is written in John 4, out of His own mouth to a woman with a jar, and it is His Spirit who quiets a heart enough to hear it as kindness rather than correction.

So put the accusation down. The reaching did not fail on the Sunday after the box came. It did exactly what reaching does. It went as far as it could go through the thing you aimed it at, and it came out the other side still reaching, because the thing was good and it was never the whole of what you were after.

The thing underneath the thing has a name

Now the crowd by the lake. Five thousand of them, fed till they were full from five loaves, and the next morning they were in boats looking for Him, because they had been full yesterday and were not full today. And He turns to them and He says the sentence this whole site is built on:

I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.John 6:35

Do you see what He did there? He did not send them home. He did not tell them to want less. He took the hunger they had brought back to Him and He gave it a name. Not "you were hungry for loaves." Not "you were hungry for a sign." He said: what you were actually after, underneath the loaves, is Me.

You have a hunger with a name on it, and the name is Jesus. That is not a line I made up at a desk. It is written in the sixth chapter of John and He said it about Himself, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a sentence He said to a crowd two thousand years ago and lays it on one particular hunger, in one particular kitchen, on one particular Sunday.

Now here is where I have to be careful, because I do not know what your thing was carrying, and I am not going to pretend to. The book was carrying something for the woman at the sink. Maybe to be seen. Maybe to be told, finally, by somebody who counted, that she was allowed to be what she said she wanted to be at a school desk. Maybe to arrive, to be home, to be able to stop proving. I do not know which of those was hers and I do not know which is yours. But He does. His Spirit searches the deep things, the things underneath the things, and He is not confused about what your reaching was ever for.

You are met underneath the thing you were chasing. He satisfies the longing soul, Psalm 107 says, and the hungry soul He fills with good things, and the Spirit who breathed that psalm is the same Spirit standing at your sink right now, not shaming the wanting but answering it.

Bread that keeps

There is one more thing He said by that lake, and I want you to hear it without a lesson attached, because you've had enough lessons this week and none of them fed you. He talked about food that spoils and food that keeps. That is all. Not "it was foolish to want the food that spoils." Just: there are two kinds, and one of them is still good on the Sunday after it arrives.

The book on the windowsill was good. It is still good. It is a good thing, and I would cheer in your hallway over it today. But it is a thing, and a thing arrives, and having arrived, it has done everything a thing can do. A Person stays. A Person is still at the table on Sunday, and Monday, and on the ordinary Tuesday three years on when the book has moved to a shelf and nobody photographs it any more.

You were given bread that keeps, and it was given before you knew to ask for it. Whoever comes to Me shall not hunger, His word says, and it is His Spirit, not the force of my sentence, who makes that true in a body standing at a sink.