The Wedge in the Kitchen Door

The door between the fellowship hall kitchen and the sanctuary has a hinge that bangs, so somebody years ago folded a cereal box into a wedge and left it on the counter, and everybody in the building knows what it is for.

Tonight she is the one who put it in. Two inches. Just enough.

Her hands are in the water. The deep steel sink, the one you can lose a whole tray in, hot enough for the first minute to make her ears ring. Behind her the urn ticks as it cools. Twenty two cups, nine dessert plates with crumbs welded to them, the good serving spoon somebody always tries to throw away. She has a dish towel over her shoulder and her sleeves pushed past her elbows and she is working fast, the way a person works when the working is the point.

Through those two inches she can hear the end of it. The visiting preacher, low now, the piano still going under him, and that particular sound a room makes when a lot of people are standing up at once.

A healing service. And she did not go forward.

Not because she does not believe. She believes so hard it costs her something every week to keep holding it. She did not go forward because she has gone forward. Eleven times in nine years, and she could give you the dates. She has been prayed for by good people with clean hands and real love, and she has been prayed for by one man who shouted, and every single time she has walked back to her seat past a row of faces that were being careful not to look at her. After the eleventh she made a decision she has never told a living soul: from now on she would ask God at home, in the kitchen, where nobody has to watch her walk back.

So tonight she volunteered for the dishes. It is a good excuse. It is also a real job, and somebody has to do it, and she is not lying to anybody, which she thinks about while the water runs.

That is you, perhaps, with your own hands in your own water. Not out of rebellion. Out of arithmetic. You did the sum on the way to church and the sum said stay in the kitchen, and now the singing is coming through a two inch gap and something in your chest has gone very quiet, and the sentence sitting underneath the quiet is the one you would never say out loud: it happens for them and it does not happen for me.

The room you did not walk into

I want to say something to the woman at the sink before I say anything else, and it is this: nobody up here is disappointed in you.

Not going forward is not unbelief. It is not small faith, it is not backsliding, and it is not a door shutting. Sometimes it is plain tiredness. Sometimes it is a person protecting a wound that has been opened in public eleven times. Both of those are the honest arithmetic of somebody who has been asking a long while, and whoever taught you that God only turns up at the front of a room taught you something that is not in the book.

Because look where He put Himself in the one place Scripture lets us watch a man ask and not get what he asked for.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me.2 Corinthians 12:9

Three times Paul asked. That is the verse before it: for this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. Not once, politely, with his hat in his hand. Three times, and the word carries begging in it. This is the apostle. And it did not depart.

Stay with me here, because what happens next is where most people get robbed.

You are in the company of a man who asked more than once and was never once scolded for asking. That is written into 2 Corinthians 12:8 in plain sight, and the Holy Spirit did not leave it out of the book to spare anybody's feelings.

Nobody gets to hand you a reason

Here is what I am not going to do to you tonight, and I want you to hear all three of them, because all three have probably been done to you already.

I am not going to explain the delay. I do not know why. And notice this, because it is the part that always gets edited out of the sermon: Paul was not told why either. He asked three times and he was not handed a reason. He was handed a Person, and the Person said my grace is sufficient for thee. That is not an explanation. That is somebody staying in the room.

I am not going to take that verse and turn it into a purpose for your body. Somebody has already done that to you, probably in a doorway, probably kindly. God is using this. God wanted you soft. There is a lesson in here somewhere. Take all of that out of your ears. Assigning a reason to another person's unanswered prayer is not ministry, it is guessing out loud, and the guess never costs the one doing the guessing.

And I am not going to do the third thing, which is the most polite and the most cruel. I am not going to quietly change what the word healing means so that I can tell you that you already have it. You asked for a body. If I answer you with a redefinition I have not comforted you, I have moved the line and called it grace. Sufficient does not mean instead of. Paul's thorn stayed, and Paul's asking was not the problem, and the grace was not a swap.

So what is left is honest, and it is not small. God heals. He heals bodies, Scripture says so without embarrassment, and I am not going to lower my voice about it just because it did not happen in this hall tonight. And I do not promise you the result. Not tonight, not next month, not ever, because I was never handed a promise to make and the current belongs to Him. Both of those are true in the same breath, and I am holding them both in front of you at once, at the sink, with your back to the door.

You have not been passed over, and the front of a room is not where standing gets decided. It is written that His grace is sufficient, and the same Spirit who was on Paul in the ship and in the prison is in a fellowship hall kitchen with the urn ticking as it cools.

And one more thing, because I am not going to leave it out to keep the mood. If nine years of this has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if you have caught yourself thinking that everybody would manage fine without you, tell one human being tonight and not next week. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your own local crisis line, and one person who can sit with you until it is light. A page cannot sit with you. You deserve somebody who can, and there is nothing weak in going to find them.