Sitting Down in a House That Measures

The kettle has been filled and it is four in the afternoon and Maribel is standing in her own front room holding a cup she has not sat down with yet.

There is a chair by the window. It is her chair, in the sense that nobody else uses it and there is a lamp beside it and a basket of things at its foot. She has owned it eleven years. She could tell you, roughly, how many times she has sat in it in daylight, because it is a number small enough to count.

Out in the kitchen the afternoon is going on. Somebody is running water. Somebody has got the back door open and is calling to somebody else about the guttering. It is a good household. That is the part to hold on to, because it would be easier if it were not. Nobody in this house is cruel and nobody in this house is her jailer, and if she went out there right now and said she was tired, every one of them would tell her to go and sit down.

They would mean it, too.

And she would not sit down, because that is not how the arithmetic works here and never has been. In this house, for three generations, a person's standing is what they got done today. It is not written anywhere. Nobody has ever said it out loud. It is in the way the day is talked about at supper, what gets asked first, who says what about their own afternoon and how quickly. A person here does not have to earn love. Love is not in question. A person here earns the right to stop, and the price is a day's work you can name out loud, and Maribel has been paying it since she was nine.

Here is what she knows now that she did not know at nine: it is not true. She knows it. Not as a slogan, either. She has been through something in the last year, quietly, in the front of her own mind, and she has come out the other side of it holding an actual conviction, which is that her worth was settled a long way from this kitchen by Somebody who never once asked what she got done.

And she is standing in her front room at four in the afternoon with a cup in her hand, not sitting down.

Because there is one more piece of arithmetic she has not put down. It is the one that says: fine, you are free, but the free thing to do would be to go somewhere free and be free there. Sitting down in this room, at four, while the water is running out there, is not freedom. It is a statement. Somebody will see it. Somebody will not say anything about it, which is worse, and it will sit at the supper table between them like a chair pulled out for a guest who did not come.

So she stands there. The coffee gets cool enough to drink and then cool enough not to want, and at twenty past four she carries it back out to the kitchen.

You are the one standing up with the cup. I am not going to say a word against your household, because I do not know them and because they are yours and because this was never about them. This is about a woman who is genuinely free and cannot get her knees to bend in her own front room. So I have come and sat down in the other chair, and I want to talk about a house where exactly this happened, and what the Lord did about it, and, more to the point, what He did not do.

Nobody Had to Shut the Kitchen

Let me name the weight first, because the tiredness is not it.

The weight is the second calculation. It is not "I am worn out". It is "the only place I am allowed to rest is somewhere else", which quietly means a free woman cannot be free at home, which means home is the one room in her life the freedom does not reach. That is a hard thing to conclude about the place you actually live, and it is a hard thing to carry while being perfectly pleasant about the guttering.

Now, the house in Scripture where this happened. There were two sisters, and one of them was serving, and she was not wrong to be serving. Somebody had to. There was a table to lay and a meal for a crowd and it was her house and she was carrying it. And her sister sat down.

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:42

Now hear what the Lord did not do, because this is the whole thing for you. He did not shut the kitchen. He did not stand up and reorganize that household. He did not turn to the woman with the dishes and put her right in front of everybody, and He did not send Mary out of the room to go and be quiet somewhere else where it would not show. He answered one person, about one person, and He left the house standing exactly as it was.

You are free to sit down inside a house that has not sat down, and you are not required to fix the arithmetic before your knees are allowed to bend. That is not my ruling to hand out. It is God's, recorded in Luke 10, and the same Spirit who put it there is in the room with the lamp and the basket.

And look where Mary was sitting. Not in another house. Not in a field. In the middle of the traffic, in the room where the serving was happening, near enough to hear every plate. You have permission to be still in the middle of a busy room, and being still there is not a comment on anybody who is not. Hear where I get it: Luke 10 puts Mary at His feet in a house full of preparation, in writing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings that scene into a front room at four in the afternoon.

The Good Part Cannot Be Taken

Now the second thing, and it is the one to carry to the chair with you.

Which shall not be taken away from her. Sit on that clause. Not taken away by her sister. Not taken away by the household's opinion of her afternoon. Not taken away by the silence at supper, or by the fact that nobody said anything, or by whatever anybody in that kitchen privately made of it. Jesus put a fence around one woman's rest and He built it out of His own word.

You were given a good part that this house has no power to take off you, and no one in it has been given a vote on it. That verdict is not mine. It is written in Luke 10:42, and His Spirit is the one who makes a written clause into an actual fence you can sit inside.

And there is a reason it cannot be taken, which is that it was never bought in the first place.

There remaineth therefore a rest to the people of God. For he that is entered into his rest, he also hath ceased from his own works, as God did from his.Hebrews 4:9-10

Ceased from his own works. That is not laziness and it is not a low view of work, and I say that as a woman who loves a full day. It is a statement about what the works were ever supposed to be doing. Ephesians 2 says we are saved by grace through faith, and that not of ourselves, not of works, lest any of us should stand up and boast about our afternoon. You are already settled by grace, and the ledger this house keeps was never the one your standing was written in. His word puts it plainly in Ephesians 2, and His Spirit is not running a second account behind it where the day's work gets totaled up after all.

I will say one thing here plainly and then leave it, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If living inside this arithmetic has gone somewhere darker than tiredness, if the nights have got heavy in a way that is being carried alone, tell one human being today, out loud, and if there is any danger at all, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Reaching for help is an ordinary thing a free woman does, and there is no shame anywhere near it.