Thirty Years Of Making The Tea

Twenty two chairs, and she knows the number without counting.

She knows which of them wobbles and which one to put at the end because the leg has gone. She knows that the boiler needs bleeding in February and who to ring, and that the man who comes will want a cup and will not ask for one. She knows which of them takes it without sugar and which one says he takes it without sugar and does not.

She has been doing this for thirty years.

And when the meeting starts, she goes through to the kitchen and does the washing up, and she hears the whole thing through the hatch.

Here is the part that would surprise anybody in that room.

She knows more about that building than any of them.

Not opinions. Facts. What has been tried before, and in which year, and what happened, and who was upset by it and got over it, and which of the two obvious solutions has already been attempted twice and failed both times for the same reason.

Nobody has ever asked her.

She has also never offered.

And that is the thing she has been turning over on and off since the spring, quietly, over a sink: she could not tell you which of those two is the actual reason she is in the kitchen.

She is not resentful. She wants that understood. She loves that building and she is fond of nearly all of them and she would do the thirty years again.

She has simply begun to wonder, at sixty three, whether she has spent three decades assuming a rule that nobody ever made.

If you have been putting out chairs you never sit in, dry a few of these. Nobody in this kitchen needs anything from you.

What He said about a woman while the room was still talking

There is a scene where a woman does something for Christ and the room turns on her, and He answers for her out loud before she has to say a word.

And there were some that had indignation within themselves, and said, Why was this waste of the ointment made? ... And Jesus said, Let her alone; why trouble ye her? she hath wrought a good work on me ... She hath done what she could.Mark 14:4, 6, 8

She hath done what she could.

That is His summary of her. Not what she could afford, not what her position entitled her to, not what anybody expected of somebody in her place. What she could.

And notice who does the talking. She does not defend herself. There is no record of her saying anything at all in that scene. He answers for her, in the room, while the criticism is still in the air, and then He says something about her being spoken of wherever the gospel goes.

You are the kind of person Christ answers for out loud in a room. Mark 14:8 has Him summarizing a woman's whole contribution as she hath done what she could, and it is the Holy Spirit who preserved that sentence in the record of the last week of His life rather than letting it be forgotten, which means what has happened in that kitchen for thirty years has had somebody speaking for it the entire time.

The rule nobody made

Now the thing over the sink, because it is the real question and it has an answer.

You have been assuming a rule. The rule is: the people who put the chairs out do not sit in them. Nobody has ever stated it. There is no document. If you asked any of those men whether such a rule exists they would be baffled and then embarrassed. It got made the way most rules like it get made, which is that somebody did a job well and quietly for a long time and everybody, including her, mistook a habit for an order.

You have been keeping a rule that was never issued, and no one in that building has the authority to have issued it. Galatians 3:28 says there is neither bond nor free, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus, and it is written of standing rather than of function, and it is the same Spirit by whom we are all baptized into one body, which means the arrangement in that hall is a habit and it has never once been a ruling.

Nothing here is against anybody

Let us be plain about what this is not, because a woman who loves that building will stop reading if she thinks it is coming.

Not one word here is against the people who lead. They are not being criticized and they are not going to be. Nobody is being told to go and raise anything, to ask for a place, or to make a point.

You are not being handed a grievance, and nothing on offer takes a single thing from anybody else. Philippians 2:3 says in lowliness of mind let each esteem other better than themselves, and it is written to people about how they carry their own place rather than about how they claim a bigger one, and it is the same Spirit who works that lowliness in a person, so what is being offered costs that room nothing.