The Jar on the Paperwork

The paperwork is on the little table at the end of the porch, and there is an empty canning jar sitting on top of it, because the wind comes up out of the hollow about this time of the evening and she has already chased those pages down the steps once this week.

Last of the light. The kind that goes orange and then goes fast. Down at the road the mail carrier has been and gone, and the beans she picked this morning are still in the colander on the step where she set them when she sat down, and she has not gotten back up. The swing chain ticks against the hook when she moves. The dog is under the swing with his chin on her shoe, the way he does when she has been quiet too long.

She has read the paperwork four times. She could tell you the shape of that paragraph without turning it over, where the lines break, which word sits by itself at the end. She reads it now through the bottom of the jar, and then sets the jar back down square in the middle of it.

On the arm of the chair beside her is her mother's Bible. It has been there since Sunday. Soft at the corners, front board coming loose, a rubber band around the middle where a woman eleven years gone kept her place. It has not been opened all week.

Not because she does not believe it. She would tell you flat out that she believes every word in it, and she would not blink. It has not been opened because she would not know where to look. Somewhere in there, she figures, God says something about a body. She could not tell you where. She could tell you the paperwork to the comma.

That is you, perhaps, on your own porch, with your own jar holding your own pages down. You know exactly what the report says. It has been read in the truck and read at the sink and read at three in the morning. And the other word, the one you would swear on in front of anybody, is sitting on the arm of the chair with a rubber band around it, closed, because somewhere along the way you picked up the notion that finding it is a job for somebody with more schooling than you have.

Not up on a shelf

I want to start where Moses started, because he was talking to people carrying the very notion you carry.

He is at the end of everything he has to say to them, and he knows exactly what they are about to do with the word God gave them. They are going to make it far away. That is what people do with a word they are afraid of getting wrong. They put it up high, on a shelf, with the good dishes, where it stays clean and stays out of reach and nobody has to handle it with everyday hands.

So he heads them off. He tells them it is not up in heaven, so that somebody would have to go up and bring it down. He tells them it is not across the sea, so that somebody would have to sail over and fetch it back. And then he tells them where it actually is.

But the word is very nigh unto thee, in thy mouth, and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.Deuteronomy 30:14

In thy mouth. Not in a library. Not in a degree. Not in the hands of a man with a good radio voice. In your mouth, which came out to the porch with you, and in your heart, which has not left you once all week.

You have a word about this body already near you, near enough to say out loud without getting up out of that chair. I did not make that up and I would not ask you to take it on my say so: Deuteronomy 30:14 is where it is written, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a sentence Moses said on the far side of the Jordan and sets it down on a porch in the last of the light. That is just what He does with what He has already said.

Now the plain part, because plain is all I know how to be. Nobody is asking you to turn scholar. You do not have to hunt down the right verse to open a door, because there is no door and there is no lock on it. A verse is not a key and God is not a safe.

What the jar is for

Look at that jar a minute, because it is doing a job and the job is worth naming.

The jar is not holding the paperwork. Gravity holds the paperwork. The jar is holding it against the wind, which is a different job altogether. Those pages would lie there just fine on a still evening. It is the wind coming up out of the hollow that takes them, and the jar is heavy and the wind is not, and that is the whole arrangement.

That is what a word out of God's mouth does in a body. It does not argue with your paperwork. Your paperwork is true. It was written by people who trained years to write it, and the care they are giving you is a good thing from God through people He made and gifted. Nothing on this page tells you to miss an appointment, stop a medicine, or set what they are doing against what He is doing. He is not in competition with the folks looking after your body. Keep your appointments. Take what they gave you. That is not small faith, that is sense, and sense was never the enemy of faith.

The wind is something else. The wind is what comes up in a person at four in the morning: the running of it, the rehearsing, the arithmetic you do in the dark about how much time and whose fault. That is what carries pages off a table. And a word from God, said out loud in your own voice, is the heaviest thing you own. It sits square in the middle of the page and the wind does not move it.

You are held down tonight by something heavier than the wind, and it was set on you before the wind ever came up out of the hollow. Hebrews 4:12 says the word of God is quick and powerful, and it is His Spirit who gives it that weight in a room, never the steadiness of the voice saying it.

Here is the pit I want you up out of, and it is the one I see the most. It is waiting to feel something before you will say something. That is backwards, and every one of us has had it backwards. Feeling is not the ticket in. Nobody was ever asked at the door how they felt when they got there. You say the word because it is true, and what it does in you afterward is His business, and He is very good at His business.

And one more thing, because I mean it, and then I will go on. If this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if some part of you has caught itself thinking the house would run easier without you in it, tell a living human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States you can call or text 988 and a person answers. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can sit on that porch with you tonight. A page cannot do that job. You need a person, and you deserve a person.