Praying While You Stir

Half past six on a Sunday and the kitchen window has gone white with condensation, so she draws a line down it with one finger to see whether the street lamp is still on.

The pot is blue enamel with white flecks and a chip on the lip. It was her grandmother's and it holds enough for four doors and some left over. The spoon is wooden with a burn mark along one edge from the night she left it lying across the ring, which is nineteen years ago now and she has never once thought about replacing it.

Onions first. Then the thyme, which she rubs between her palms so the kitchen smells like a decision has been made.

The four doors are these. Number eleven, where a man is home from the hospital and moving around his own front room like a person crossing a river on stones. Number six, twins, five months old, and a mother whose eyes have gone somewhere behind her face. Number twenty, Mrs. Adeyemi, ninety-one, who will eat two spoonfuls and put the rest in the freezer and tell her next week that it was lovely. And the flat over the shop, where somebody new moved in three weeks ago and has not yet said his name to anybody, so she leaves it on the mat and goes.

She prays while she stirs. It is not a system. It is just that her hands are busy and her mouth is free, and one name arrives with each turn of the spoon. The man crossing the river. The mother with the missing eyes. Mrs. Adeyemi and her freezer. The man over the shop whose name she does not know, which she takes to the Lord as a small apology and a large request.

The extractor fan makes its noise. The window streams.

And at ten to eleven, every single Sunday, the bells go from two streets over.

They are good bells. She has never had one word against them. She used to walk toward them and she can still hear the third one lagging behind the others the way it always did.

And every Sunday at ten to eleven, when the bells come across the roofs and into her steamy little kitchen, the same thought arrives and lands like a plate dropped on tile.

None of this counts.

Not: God is not real. Not: I have stopped believing. She stirs while she thinks it, and she goes on praying afterward, because both things are somehow true at once. The thought is only this, and it is very quiet and very heavy: whatever is happening here, over a pot, on a Sunday, with four foil containers cooling on the counter, it is not the real thing. The real thing is two streets over. This is what you do when you cannot do the real thing.

She lifts the lid. She tastes it off the burnt spoon. It needs salt.

Who is doing the counting

Sit down a minute. There is a question underneath the thought that lands at ten to eleven, and it is a better question than the thought.

The question is: who is doing the counting?

Because a thought that says none of this counts is a thought about an accountant. It assumes there is a ledger somewhere, and a column, and that what happens in a steamy kitchen goes in the narrow column and what happens two streets over goes in the wide one. And once you assume the ledger, everything else follows, including the heaviness.

So let us go and look at the actual accounting, because God did not leave it to us to guess at.

Here is the sentence. Colossians 3:17, and I want you to hear the first word of it more than any other: and whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus. Whatsoever. Not whatsoever done in a certain room. Not whatsoever done with a certain number of people present. The word has no address written on it, none at all, and that is not my clever reading, that is what is on the page, and the Holy Spirit put that word there and has been carrying it into a kitchen at ten to eleven while the bells are going. Your stirring is in the name of the Lord Jesus. That is already the case, this morning, over that pot.

And whatsoever ye do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God and the Father by him.Colossians 3:17

Now, I am not going to tell you the bells are wrong. They are not. That third one lagging behind the others has been calling people to Him for longer than either of us has been alive, and the people walking toward it this morning are your brothers and your sisters, and what they are reaching for is real and good and I will not say a word against it.

And where you should be next Sunday is not mine to say. I do not know your street, your history, your body, your Wednesday, or the reason you are standing at that stove instead of in that building, and a person who does not know those things has no business issuing instructions about them. This message is not here to move you. It is here to tell you the truth about where you already are.

Which is this. You are inside, not outside. Not because being at the stove is superior, and not because the building does not matter, but because the thing that put you inside was never a location. Scripture says He has made you accepted in the Beloved, and accepted is a finished verb, done, filed, complete, and His Spirit sealed it on you and has not moved out because you are standing over a pot.

Hear it again, because the thought at ten to eleven is loud and old.

You were not put out. You have not been reclassified. What is happening in that kitchen is not a substitute for the real thing; He counts it as the real thing, because His word says whatsoever and because the same Spirit who fills a room of a thousand singing people is filling a kitchen with an extractor fan going and four names being lifted one per turn of the spoon.