A Kitchen On Christmas Morning

The front door goes three times in ninety seconds, which is how she knows they are actually leaving.

Someone comes back for a scarf. Someone comes back for the second car key. Her son shouts something from the path about being back by twelve and the words get taken sideways by the wind. Then two engines, then one engine, then the particular silence of a house with the heating on and nobody in it.

Nine twenty in the morning. December twenty fifth.

She stands in the middle of the kitchen with a tea towel over her shoulder and lets the quiet arrive properly, the way you let a wave go past instead of jumping it.

The oven is already on. There is a roasting pan on the second shelf with a foil tent over it, and the fan makes that low steady note that will be the sound of the next three hours. On the counter: peeled potatoes in cold water, a bag of frozen peas sweating onto the wood, and the radio turned down so low it is really only a suggestion of a radio.

In the hall there is a smashed glass ornament that got knocked off the tree during the scramble and that nobody swept, and she will sweep it, but not yet.

She goes to the sink and runs the water hot and puts both hands in and stands there.

And she prays. Out loud, because there is nobody to hear it. Not a formal one. She says a name, and then another name, and then the name of the one she is worried about, and then she stops and says something plainer than anything she said in twenty years of Sundays.

It is You. It has always been You.

The water gets too hot and she does not move her hands.

Somewhere on the other side of town there is a building she knows the smell of. Everyone she loves is in it right now, sitting down, standing up, and she can see the exact patch of ceiling they are all looking at. She is not bitter about it. That is the strange part, and the part she cannot explain to anybody: there is no bitterness in the room at all. There is a roasting pan and a radio and her two hands in water gone too hot, and there is God, unmistakably, in this kitchen, at nine twenty on Christmas morning.

She dries her hands on the towel over her shoulder. She checks the oven, which does not need checking. She goes and sweeps up the ornament, because you cannot leave glass on a floor.

The hand is not a building

Let me clear one thing out of the way immediately, because this page could very easily become something it must not be.

Nothing here is an argument with that building. The people in it are your people. Whatever they are singing this morning is not a lesser thing, and the version of this message that scores a point off a congregation is a version I will not write. Everyone you love is in there and they are loved by the same God who is standing in your kitchen.

And nothing here tells you what to do about it either. Go back, stay out, visit at Easter, sit at the very back and leave during the last song: this page does not know your story, and a page that does not know your story has no business handing you an instruction that a real person would act on.

What this page can do is tell you where you are. And where you are is inside a hand.

You are held right now, in a kitchen with the oven fan going, by the grip described in John 10:28, where the Lord says no man is able to pluck them out of His hand. That is what is written, and the Spirit of God is what turns it from a nice line about somebody else into a present fact over a sink at nine twenty.

"My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me: And I give unto them eternal life; and they shall never perish, neither shall any man pluck them out of my hand."John 10:27-28, KJV

Notice what the sheep are doing in that sentence. Hearing. Being known. Following. There is not one word in it about the field they are standing in.

That matters this morning, because the ache you woke up with runs on an assumption you have never actually examined: that being outside a structure and being outside the fold are the same event. They are not the same event. One is a matter of geography and circumstances and a long story you are tired of telling. The other is a matter of whose voice you know, and you knew it in your own kitchen this morning before the coffee was cold.

You have been heard already today. Not overheard, not tolerated, heard, which is His word's own verb for what happens between a shepherd and his own. His Spirit was in that room while you said a name and then another name, and He did not need a roof over it to receive it.

Here is the thing about being alone in a house on a Christmas morning. The pretending stops. Nobody is watching your face, so your face does whatever it wants, and the prayer that comes out is not the prayer you would have offered from a pew. It is shorter, and it is truer, and it is the one He answers.

You were given a shepherd who knows your voice and not just your address, because Scripture puts the knowing between Him and the sheep rather than between the sheep and the fence, and the same Spirit who wrote that line is standing in the steam with you.