The Breadboard at Mile Marker Six

For the one who has been remembering beautifully and receiving nothing.

The breadboard is the old one, scarred right through the middle, and underneath it there's a card in her handwriting with a date on it and four words.

You found it on a Thursday, moving the board to get at a mouse trap behind the bin. The card gives the date, then the words bread and cup, first Sunday. It is a note she wrote to herself, probably eleven or twelve years ago, and she never once mentioned it to you.

She's been gone nineteen months. The orchard is at the point in the season where you can't do much except walk it, and you've walked it more this month than you have in forty years.

You've been carrying that card in your shirt pocket for nine days now, and you have taken it out in the orchard, in the van, and twice at the kitchen table.

What you've been doing with it is remembering. You take it out, you look at the handwriting, you think about the woman who wrote it, and you put it back. You've done that perhaps sixty times, and every one of those sixty was about her.

Remembering is something you do about her, and receiving is something He does toward you. The written word puts the remembrance at the end of a sentence about a body broken for you, and the Spirit is the one who makes the receiving real.

Two Different Directions

Separate the two motions carefully, because they feel similar from the inside and they run opposite ways.

Remembering moves outward from you. You reach back toward a person or an occasion, you hold it in your mind for as long as you can, and the whole transaction is yours from beginning to end. It costs you something and it gives you something, and when it finishes you are exactly where you started, alone with a card.

Receiving moves toward you. Something comes from outside, arrives, and is taken. You don't generate it and you can't manufacture it by concentrating harder, and the only part that's yours is the taking.

Nineteen months of grief has made you extremely good at the first motion. You could remember professionally by now, and the second one you have not attempted once since the funeral.

Grief does that to careful people. It teaches an intensive skill in one direction and quietly lets the opposite one lapse, and because the skill being practiced is a form of love, nobody ever names the lapse as a loss.

You have become expert at the motion that ends where it started. The written word describes something given toward you, and the Spirit brings it rather than drawing it out of you.

Broken For You

Here's the verse, and the preposition in the middle of it is the one that matters.

And when he had given thanks, he brake it, and said, Take, eat: this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me.1 Corinthians 11:24 (KJV)

Broken for you. That's a direction, and the direction is toward the person holding the bread. Something happened, at cost, and the benefit of it travels outward from Him and arrives at you.

The remembrance clause comes afterwards, and it is a response rather than the substance of the matter. The substance is a body broken and handed over at cost. The remembering is what you do about it once it is already in your hands.

Put the two in the wrong order and the whole occasion becomes an exercise in concentration, which is exhausting and produces nothing. That is a fair description of your last nineteen months.

Paul said that to a congregation who had turned the whole occasion into an opportunity for showing off, and it carries across to a man in an orchard with a card in his shirt pocket.

The benefit travels toward you, and the remembering comes after it. The written word puts the breaking first, and the Spirit delivers it in that order.

She Wrote a Note to Herself

Consider what the card actually is, because you've been reading it as a relic and it was a working document.

She wrote the date and four words on a card and put it under a breadboard. That's not a memorial. That's an ordinary woman making a practical note about something she intended to do in her own kitchen on a particular Sunday.

She wasn't remembering anything when she wrote it. She was arranging to receive something. The card is evidence of a woman planning to take something, in her own kitchen, with bread and a cup, on a date she had settled in advance.

Which means she had done this before. Nobody writes a note like that for a first attempt. A note like that belongs to a practice that was already running, quietly, in a house you lived in for forty years.

You've spent nine days remembering a woman who was, at the moment she wrote that card, doing the exact thing you haven't done in nineteen months.

Her card was a plan to receive rather than a memorial to be kept. The written word describes the same arrangement, and the Spirit prompted a woman to write it under a breadboard.

I Am Not Telling You to Stop Remembering Her

Be clear, because grief must not be tidied up and I have no intention of tidying yours.

Remember her. Walk the orchard, take the card out, keep doing it for as long as you need to, which may well be the rest of your life. Nobody is asking you to move on from a woman you had forty years with.

Nor am I telling you the two are in competition. You can do both, on the same morning, at the same table, and she would almost certainly have preferred it that way.

What I want for you is the second motion. Not less of the first. Not a shorter grief.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

Written by Elias This message is free. Nothing here is locked, nothing is for sale, and nothing is being asked of you.