Not The Good One

Fourth time in a year, and she caught it on the fourth.

Somebody down the road was baking for a christening and needed a big bowl, and she said of course, and she went to the cupboard, and she reached past the good one and took out the spare.

The spare is fine. It is a perfectly good bowl. It is slightly too shallow and the glaze has gone dull and it does not sit right on the counter, and it is genuinely fine and nobody has ever complained about it.

The good one is her grandmother's. Heavy, deep, glazed the color of wet clay, sits like it grew there.

She has never once lent the good one.

Standing there with the spare in her hands she went back through the year. The christening. The woman with the broken oven who borrowed a roasting tin, the second best tin. Her nephew borrowing a suitcase, the one with the wheel that sticks. A neighbor taking the folding chairs, four of the six, the four that are not the comfortable ones.

She has two of nearly everything. She never planned that and it is not deliberate and she could not tell you when it started.

But the pattern is complete. She has never in her life handed anybody the one she loves.

Of thine own have we given thee

Put the spare down a minute, because David says something at the end of his life about where things come from, and it takes the good one out of the argument entirely.

But who am I, and what is my people, that we should be able to offer so willingly after this sort? for all things come of thee, and of thine own have we given thee.1 Chronicles 29:14

Of thine own have we given thee.

That is a man standing in front of an enormous pile of gathered material saying: none of the origin of this is mine.

Not the amount. The origin. He is not saying he gathered too little, and he is not being scolded, and nobody in the passage is unhappy with him. He is saying the source of it was never in him and he has worked that out and he is glad about it.

Hear this in your own kitchen. There is nothing wrong with you for loving the good bowl, and the written word is what settles it. Scripture puts the origin of every good thing outside the person holding it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who put your hands under a bowl for a christening in the first place.

Now let me name what the spare is doing, because it is not meanness and it would be a stupid word for a woman who says yes every time.

It is a small insurance policy against a specific grief.

If the spare goes and comes back chipped, that is a shame and it is over in a minute. If the good one goes and comes back chipped, something has gone out of the family that you cannot get back, and you would say nothing about it, and you would mind for twenty years.

That is not greed. That is a completely reasonable calculation and you have been running it silently at a cupboard door for a decade.

Hear this too, and let it land where you stood with the spare. You have not been fooling anybody or falling short of anything, and Scripture is what says so. What is written says all things come of Him and of His own we have given Him, and the Spirit of God is not measuring a woman by which bowl comes out of a cupboard.

And let me be plain, because this subject gets ruined and it will not be ruined here. Nobody is asking you to give the good bowl away. Not to a person and not to a church and not to anybody teaching you anything, and if a page ever tells you that your grandmother's bowl belongs to an organization you may close it. The good one stays yours. It goes out on a Tuesday and it comes home.