I Feed People From A Kitchen I Do Not Eat In

Denise can make sense of anybody's life except one part of her own, and she has never once asked about it.

She is the person people bring their confusion to. Not for comfort particularly; for sense. She reads carefully, she thinks clearly, and she can take a tangle somebody has been carrying for four years and lay it out on the table in front of them until they can see the shape of it.

It is not a trick and it is not glibness. She has spent twenty years learning to do it properly, and the people she does it for are genuinely better afterwards, and several of them will tell you it changed something.

She is forty-three.

And there is one thing in her own life, nine years old, that has never been given a meaning by anybody, including her.

She is not going to lay it out here. She will say that it happened over about fourteen months, that it took something she is not getting back, and that everybody involved behaved better than could reasonably have been expected, which somehow makes it worse rather than better.

She has never asked what it meant.

Not once. She has thought about it constantly, and she has processed it, and she has made her peace with it in the way a competent person makes peace with things. But she has never turned to God and asked the plain question, out loud, on her own behalf.

She noticed that about five weeks ago and she has not been able to get past it.

Because she asks on behalf of other people all the time. She does it in front of them, at tables, and she means it, and she waits with them. She simply has never done it for herself, and she cannot tell you why, and the reason she cannot tell you is that there is not a reason, there is just a habit that has been running unexamined for nine years.

You may know that kitchen.

Maybe you also make sense of everybody. Maybe there is one thing of yours that has never been made sense of. And maybe you have never actually asked.

The verb and who it is aimed at

There is a short instruction in the middle of the chapter, and it is one verb and one aim, and neither of them has an exception written into it.

Even so ye, forasmuch as ye are zealous of spiritual gifts, seek that ye may excel to the edifying of the church.1 Corinthians 14:12

Seek.

That is an active verb aimed at the reader. Not receive if offered. Not be given. Seek, which means go after, ask for, pursue on purpose, and it is written to ordinary people about ordinary gatherings.

Now hold it against nine years. You have sought on behalf of dozens of people and you have never once sought for yourself, and there is nothing in this verse that makes that distinction. The instruction has no clause excluding the seeker from the benefit.

And look at the aim: to the edifying of the church. You have read that, for twenty years, as a restriction that points away from yourself. But a church is people, and you are one of them, and a woman who has been feeding a table for two decades while never sitting down at it has not been obeying that clause more carefully than everybody else. She has been reading herself out of the room the clause is about.

And the seeking was never restricted to other people's lives. The written word gives one active verb aimed at the reader with no exception written into it, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who brings that to a woman who noticed five weeks ago and has not got past it.

And He gives the meaning as well as the words. The word keeps both halves in His hands for everybody it is written to, and the Spirit is the one who supplies them rather than sorting a room into servers and served.

Why you have never asked

Now the mechanism, because there is no reason and there is a cause, and those are different.

You are the one who makes sense of things. In every room you have been in for twenty years, that has been your position, and positions are not neutral: they organize what a person does automatically.

Asking is what the other chair does. The person in your chair does not ask; the person in your chair receives the question and works on it. Nine years of that thing sitting in your life and it has never once occurred to you to move seats, because your body has been in that chair since your twenties.

And there is a second thing and it is quieter. If you asked, you could get nothing. And a woman who has spent twenty years helping people find sense would then be a woman who asked for her own and was not answered, and there is no comfortable place to put that.

You have never articulated that. It has never needed articulating; it just kept the question from forming.

And what has held is a chair rather than a lack of faith. The word says cast thy burden upon the LORD, in the plain imperative, and the Spirit is the one who makes that an instruction to the helper as much as to anybody at her table.

And nothing about you is under review for nine years of not asking. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman who has carried other people's tangles the whole time.

And nobody is promising you an answer

Let me be plain, because you would spot it immediately if I fudged this and you would be right to.

Nothing here says that if you finally ask, you will be told. I do not know and nobody on this page does, and promising it would be exactly the failure this whole subject is fenced against, and you would never forgive an article that did it.

And nothing here rules on anybody's practice or on what should happen in any room, because that is not this page's business.

What is on offer is the asking itself, once, out loud, on your own behalf, and the willingness to reach the end of it with nothing.

That willingness is not a consolation prize. It is the substance of the thing, and you already teach it, and you have simply never had to hold it yourself.

And you are permitted to sit down at your own table. The word aims the seeking at the reader with no exception for the one who usually explains, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a permission rather than a reversal of twenty years.