The Woman Who Stopped Asking

She has been awake since four, and she has not asked anybody for anything since she was nine years old.

That is the number she would give you, and she would give it too fast, the way people do with a fact worn into a groove. Nine. A kitchen with a linoleum floor, a woman she loved standing at the sink with her back turned, and a sentence delivered with no heat in it whatsoever: we do not ask for things in this house. It was not cruelty. It was housekeeping. The woman at the sink had been taught the same rule by somebody who loved her, and she passed it down the way you pass down a recipe, without ever tasting it again to check.

So the girl learned the trick, and the trick worked. You do not ask. You admire. You say that is nice instead of I would like that. You take the smaller half and you take it first, before anybody can offer you the bigger one, because being offered is dangerous, it means somebody saw. By fifty nobody had any idea what she wanted, including her, and she had begun to think of that as a kind of holiness.

Now she is sixty-one and it is four in the morning on the porch, and the ridge is starting to come up out of the dark, that particular gold that only lasts about nine minutes. There are two enamel mugs on the boards, one for her and one set out from habit for a man who has been gone four years. The coffee is going cold in both.

Something came to her this spring. I am not going to tell you what it was. If I name it you will hold it up beside your own and start working out whose was bigger, and that arithmetic is the whole thing I am trying to get you out from under. It was the thing. Hers. The one she had never once said out loud, not to the woman at the sink, not to the man who drank from the second mug. And it came, and she said thank you very nicely, and put it away where she puts things, and by the second week the hunger was back on the step beside her with its chin on its paws.

That is the part she cannot get past. She has been good. She stopped asking at nine and stayed stopped for fifty-two years, which is a long obedience to a rule nobody ever checked. All that stopping bought her was quiet. It never once bought her full.

So she sits with the cold mug and the gold coming up the ridge, and the sentence under everything finally surfaces, and it is not what you would expect. It is not I want something. It is this: there must be something wrong with me, that I am still hungry after all of that.

Maybe you are on that step. Maybe you learned it in a different kitchen from a different person who loved you, and you have kept the rule beautifully, and you are starving.

The stopping was never the meal

I want to say the true thing first, because most people who find their way here have already been told the opposite by somebody who meant it kindly.

She was taught that a satisfied person is one who has stopped asking. It is worth saying plainly what is wrong with that rule. It is not a description of satisfaction. It is a description of quiet. The two look identical from across a room and they have almost nothing to do with each other. A person who has stopped asking may be full or may be empty, and the rule cannot tell you which, because it was never measuring that. It was measuring how much noise they made.

You are hungry, and you are not greedy, and that whole difference is what God has to say to you this morning. I am not offering you a soft word to make the morning easier. Isaiah 25:6 has the Lord of hosts spreading a feast on a mountain for all people, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line about a feast and sets it down in front of a woman on a porch step at four in the morning as though her name were on the invitation.

Look at what God actually does at this point in the book. Isaiah has been writing about ruin for chapters. Cities down, walls down. And then, right there, with not one word of instruction about appetite, this:

And in this mountain shall the Lord of hosts make unto all people a feast of fat things, a feast of wines on the lees, of fat things full of marrow, of wines on the lees well refined.Isaiah 25:6

Read the menu again, because the menu is the sermon. Fat things. Marrow. Wine that has sat on the lees long enough to become itself and then been strained until it is clear. That is not a ration. Nobody writes a line like that if the point is moderation. God is not standing at the head of that table apologizing for how much He put out. He is describing the spread with what I can only call relish.

And notice who is invited. All people. Not the disciplined ones, not the ones who mastered the trick of not asking. All. The invitation does not run a check on your appetite at the door.

You were made with a hunger God fully intends to feed, and He set aside a mountain to do it on. Isaiah wrote that down long before you were born and it has been standing there ever since, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries a written line about a mountain into a kitchen or onto a porch and makes it about you.

A feast is not a correction

Here is the thing about being taught not to ask. It does not remove the hunger. It removes the asking. The hunger stays exactly where it was, and now it has no mouth, so it goes down into the body and turns into something else: a low restlessness, a habit of scanning, a tiredness nobody can find a cause for. That is what fifty-two years of the rule produced. Not a full woman. A quiet one, with the hunger still sitting on the step.

And I want you to see what the rule was teaching her about God, because this is the injury underneath the injury. If the way to be good is to want nothing, then God is a host who resents His guests. He is somebody you must not put out. You come to His door and you say oh, nothing for me, I am fine, and you go home hungry and you call it reverence.

Isaiah says the opposite so plainly it is nearly blunt. The Lord of hosts is the One who spreads the feast. It is His mountain, His table, His wine, His idea. Nobody talked Him into it.

You have a place at a table God laid Himself, and it was laid long before you learned to be quiet about wanting. The written word says the feast is made for all people, and the Holy Spirit is the One who turns an old prophecy about a mountain into a chair pulled out from a table this morning.

Jesus told a story about a man who threw a great supper and sent word to say come, for all things are now ready. The ones invited made excuses, every one of them polite. I have bought a field. I have bought oxen. I pray thee have me excused. Do you hear the manners in it? They refused because they did not want to be a bother. And the host filled his house anyway, from the highways and the hedges, with people who had no manners left to lose.

You are welcome at that supper without one word of explanation for why you are hungry. Luke 14 has the host saying come, for all things are now ready, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes that sentence off a page and stands it in a doorway you are already standing in.