In My Mother's Own Hand

The drawer is the one everybody has. String, a tape measure, three keys to nothing, batteries that may or may not be dead, and about forty envelopes with things written on the back of them.

Her mother wrote on envelopes her whole life. Never a notepad. Never once bought a notepad. If a thing was worth writing down it went on the back of whatever the electric bill came in.

So she is sitting at the table with the drawer emptied out on the oilcloth, doing the job you do in the fortnight after, and she is going through them one at a time because you have to look before you throw.

Measurements for a curtain. A phone number with no name. Somebody's birthday. A recipe with the flour crossed out and written again bigger.

And then one that is a whole sentence.

Copied out careful, the way her mother wrote when she was concentrating, letters standing up straight, the pen pressing harder on the downstrokes. The verse about the storehouse and the windows of heaven, all of it, right to the end.

And on the other side, in the same pen, on the front of the envelope: potatoes, tea, two tins, ask about Doreen's knee.

That is it. No note under it. No address on the envelope from any ministry. Nothing folded inside. Just a woman who lived in this kitchen and had nothing whatever to gain, copying out that sentence one afternoon in her own hand, between the potatoes and Doreen's knee.

And she sits there with it a long time, because she has heard that verse a hundred times and it has never once sounded like this.

And you know that feeling, because there is a piece of Scripture you have only ever met as somebody's material, and you have never seen it in a plain person's handwriting.

The One being tested is God

Let us settle the thing that governs this whole page, and it is not a technique and there is nothing on it for you to do.

You are looking at an invitation, and the One being tested inside it is God. That is not a kind reading. That is the plain grammar of the sentence, and the Holy Spirit is not a bit shy about it. Here it is whole:

Bring the full tithe into the storehouse, that there may be food in my house. And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of heaven for you and pour down for you a blessing until there is no more need.Malachi 3:10

Put me to the test. The older Bibles say prove me now, which is where the old ring in it comes from. Either way, look where the verb goes. It goes to Him. He is the one under examination. He is the one who put Himself up to be found out.

Nowhere in that line is a reader of this page handed a lever. And nothing is asked of you here. No appeal at the bottom, no request three paragraphs down where a person usually stops bracing, nothing to join and nothing to sign. Read it to the end and then go back to your drawer.

Now the room it was said in, because that room hardly ever gets described.

Malachi is the last voice at the tired end of a long story. The temple is rebuilt after the exile and it is running poorly. The people who served in it had no fields and no other living; they were meant to eat out of what came in, and it had stopped coming in, so they had gone home to work their ground. The lamps were low. The house was half staffed. And into that God says: fill the store so there is food in my house, and then watch what I do.

It is a sentence about people eating. A nation, one building, one decade, and the outcome named in it is that the fields would not fail again.

You have been handed one line out of that chapter your whole life and never once the room it stood in, and that is not the text being thin. It is the quoting that got thin. Scripture is never embarrassed by its own setting, and the Spirit has never needed a verse trimmed down before He could speak through it.

Put the sentence back in its chapter and it stops being a mechanism and turns into a character reference.

He is not saying: work this and I am obliged. He is saying: you have decided I am the sort of God who lets His own house go cold and lets His own people go hungry. Come and look. Find out whether that is who I am.

That is a plain and enormous thing for a person to say about themselves, and God said it about Himself.

Now here is what your mother knew, sitting at this table, and it is worth saying out loud.

A verse belongs to the people who live with it, not to whoever says it loudest, and that sentence was hers on an ordinary Tuesday with no crowd anywhere near it. It is written that the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart (Deuteronomy 30:14), which is a long way from a platform and about the distance from here to the oilcloth. It is the Holy Spirit who takes a line like that and makes it true in a kitchen rather than true in general.

You are invited to come and find Him faithful, and every last bit of the exposure in that arrangement is His. The written word does this all over. Taste and see that the Lord is good (Psalm 34:8). Come now, and let us reason together (Isaiah 1:18). Come and you will see (John 1:39), spoken by Jesus to two men following Him down a road who did not know how to ask for anything. And it is His Spirit, not this paragraph of mine, who lifts an invitation off a page and sets it down on an oilcloth in the fortnight after a funeral.

And for the reader who has come here with their jaw set, because they are half of why this site exists: some of you did what that verse was used to ask of you. Sincerely, at cost, and you watched, and nothing opened. Nobody here is going to explain that away, stand up for anybody, or hint that you read the terms wrong. Nobody is going to tell you it was too little or that you believed it poorly, because that is a lie and it has hurt plenty of people already. Your disappointment can sit at this table exactly as it is.

You have a God who put no price on the door He is inviting you through, and there is nothing in your hands that He is waiting for. That is what is written, and it is His Spirit rather than my wording that makes it land: while we were still a long way off, all the running was done by the Father.