Twenty Years And Never Used

Ruby got it in 2005 and she is seventy-four and it has never once been any use to anybody.

It came the way those things come, which in her case is quietly and while she is doing something with her hands. She was hanging washing. It was about a woman in her church, a specific thing, and it was not a suspicion and it was not gossip because there was no gossip about that woman and there never has been.

Ruby did not tell her. She thought about it for a long time and she could not see how telling her would help, and she has never been able to see it since.

The woman is still alive. They are friendly. They have sat at the same table perhaps two hundred times in twenty years and Ruby has never brought it up and does not intend to.

And every so often, generally when something reminds her, Ruby wonders what on earth it was for.

That is the honest question and she has never asked anybody it. She has a working theory, which she does not much like, that she must have missed the moment. That there was an occasion, somewhere in twenty years, when it was supposed to be said, and she was not paying attention, and it went past.

She is not tormented by this. She is seventy-four and has buried a husband and does not torment easily. But it sits there, and every time it surfaces she has to put it down again, and she has put it down several hundred times now.

You may have one of your own.

Maybe you have something given years ago that has never had an occasion. Maybe you have also wondered whether you missed the moment. And maybe you have never said it out loud because there is no way to say it that does not sound like either a boast or a confession.

A woman who kept things and did nothing with them

There is a sentence in Luke that gets read every December and almost nobody notices what it does not contain.

But Mary kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.Luke 2:19

Kept. Pondered.

That is the whole of it. There is no third verb. She does not tell anybody. She does not act on it. She does not go and find the shepherds afterwards to compare accounts, and she does not go to the temple to have it confirmed.

And Luke does not present this as a failure or as a stage she is at. He reports it as what she did, and then the narrative moves on, and it happens again in the same chapter thirty years of story later.

Which means keeping and pondering, with no announcement and no action, is described in Scripture as a complete and legitimate thing to do with something you have been given.

And you have been doing the whole of what was asked. The written word gives two verbs and no third, and never once records a rebuke for the absence of a third, and it is the Holy Spirit and not my paragraph who makes that reach a woman who has put something down several hundred times.

And you have not missed the moment. The word treats keeping as the action rather than as the failure to take one, and the Spirit bears witness with your spirit rather than confirming a theory you do not much like anyway.

What you have been assuming it is for

Let me name the assumption underneath, because I think it is the thing costing you, and it is nearly universal.

You have assumed that a thing given is a thing to be delivered.

That the point of receiving something is to pass it on, and that if it has not been passed on then either it was not really given or you failed to deliver it. Those are the only two options in that framework, and both of them are uncomfortable, which is why you put it down rather than looking at it.

But there is a third possibility that the framework does not allow for, and it is the one Luke describes.

Some things are given to be known by one person, and held, and prayed about, and never said. The knowing changes how that person treats somebody. It changes what they do not say. It changes whether they are surprised, and whether they are gentle, and whether they push at a particular moment.

Two hundred times at the same table, over twenty years, being quietly gentle with a woman about a thing she does not know you know.

That is not a wasted gift. That is the gift working exactly as it was operating the whole time, invisibly, and you have been looking straight past it because it never produced an event.

And you have been using it for twenty years without noticing. The word says charity suffereth long and is kind, and it describes an operation rather than an announcement, and the Spirit is the one who has been doing that in you at a table two hundred times.

And nothing about you is under review for the silence. The word says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit supplies that to a woman with a working theory she does not like.

And it is not yours to deliver now

One more thing, plainly, because a message like this can produce a strange impulse at seventy-four.

Nothing here is telling you to go and tell her. Twenty years on, out of nowhere, to a woman who has not asked, would not be obedience catching up. It would be a very old thing being unloaded, and the person carrying the cost of that would be her.

Keep keeping it.

And you are permitted to carry something to the end without ever saying it. The word has Mary keeping and pondering and never once reporting, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a complete assignment rather than an unfinished one.