The Name Folded Into the Recipe Book

For the one who cannot lift one small thing because of what is folded in with it.

You've got a recipe book open on the counter at the soup page, and folded into the spine there's a piece of paper with one name on it.

The name is your neighbor two doors up, whose husband died in March. It's September. You wrote the name down in about April and you've moved the paper from book to book since then.

The soup takes forty minutes. You've made it perhaps two hundred times. You have every ingredient in the house tonight, which you checked, without particularly meaning to, while you were putting the shopping away.

You are not going to make it. You know that already, and you knew it when you opened the book, and this will be the eleventh or twelfth time.

Because it isn't only a name on that paper. Folded in with it there is the fact that you are five months late. There is the question of what she will think when you turn up, and the memory of doing this for years as part of something that told you when it was your turn.

Guilt and an audience were folded in with that name, and love needs neither of them to move. The written word names love as the mechanism, and the Spirit has kept one name in a recipe book since April.

Unfold the Paper Properly

Separate what's actually written from what you've added, because they've been traveling together for five months.

Written on the paper: one name. That is the whole of it. A woman two doors up whose husband died in March, and who is presumably still eating badly, in the way that people do for most of the first year.

Not written on the paper: that you are five months late. That she might find it odd. That you used to do this under an arrangement and no longer have one. That somebody might think you were making a point about her situation.

That last one is the strangest of them, and it is worth saying out loud, because it has never once been examined. There is no somebody. Nobody is watching a street to see who takes soup to whom, and there never has been.

Every one of those you supplied. They've attached themselves to a piece of paper with one word on it, and the paper now weighs enough that you cannot lift it on a Tuesday evening with all the ingredients in the house.

Only one word is actually written on that paper, and you supplied the rest. The written word asks love to direct you, and the Spirit has kept the name in front of you since April.

By Love, Not by Guilt

Here's the verse, and the mechanism it names is worth comparing with the one you've been using.

For, brethren, ye have been called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an occasion to the flesh, but by love serve one another.Galatians 5:13 (KJV)

By love serve one another. Love is what the serving runs on. Not obligation, not a schedule, and not the accumulated pressure of having meant to do something since April.

Guilt is a poor fuel and it has been demonstrating that for five months. It has produced eleven or twelve evenings of a book being opened and closed again. No soup. A woman two doors up who has had nothing from anybody since about May.

Paul wrote that to believers who had been running on obligation for a very long time and were exhausted by it, and it carries across to a kitchen with a recipe book open on the counter.

Guilt has produced eleven evenings and no soup, which is what guilt produces. The written word names love instead, and the Spirit has kept it warm since April.

Late Is Not a Disqualification

Deal with the lateness directly, because it's the heaviest of the folded items.

You think five months late is worse than not at all. It isn't, and you'd know that immediately if it were anybody else's situation being described to you.

Think about what September actually is for her. March was full of people. April had some. By June it had thinned considerably, and since about July she has been eating alone in a house with nobody calling in at all, which is the part of grief that nobody warns anybody about beforehand.

Everybody who was going to come has come. The casseroles stopped, the cards stopped, and the phone calls have settled into a pattern of about one a fortnight from her sister.

Soup in September is not late. It's arriving precisely when everybody else has stopped, which is the moment at which it is worth the most it will ever be worth.

September is not late, it's the month everybody else stopped coming. The written word puts love in charge of the timing, and the Spirit has held this until now.

I Am Not Telling You to Explain Yourself

Be clear, because there's a version of this that makes it worse.

Don't apologize for the five months when you hand it over. An apology makes the gift about your conscience and requires her to reassure you, which is work she does not need on a Tuesday evening.

Nor am I telling you to stay and talk. You might. She might want you to. But take it, say it's soup, and let her decide how much company she is up to.

What I want off you is the fold. Not the care. Not the five months of meaning to.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.

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