Shopping for a Siege

The chest freezer lives in the utility room and there is a second one, a small upright, in the garage, and the second one was not a joke when she bought it.

She shops on payday and she shops properly. Not extravagantly. Strategically. She buys the big bags of rice and the chicken when it is reduced and she portions it out in the evening in front of the television, and she labels everything, and she has a system, and she is genuinely good at it.

And she was awake at two on Thursday doing the count.

Not a worry, exactly. The count. Rent, gone out. Electric, on the meter. What is in the account and what is coming and what is left after. She has done that count so many thousands of times that it runs on its own, and she can do the whole of it in under a minute now, and it wakes her up to do it.

Here is the strange part. The count comes out fine. It has come out fine for about three years. She has a job that pays reasonably, and she is not behind on anything, and there are two freezers of food in this house.

There was a stretch, when the children were small, when the count did not come out fine. Six years of it. There were weeks she gave them what there was and ate the toast crusts off their plates and told everybody she was not hungry.

Nobody knew. She made absolutely sure nobody knew. And she got them through it, and they are twenty two and nineteen and neither of them has any idea, and that is exactly how she wanted it.

So there is a woman with two freezers, awake at two, doing a count that comes out fine, and the freezers have not touched it.

You know that two o'clock. Yours might be a stock of something else. Yours might be an emergency fund you keep adding to that never reaches the size where it would let you sleep. The store is not the problem. The store is doing its job. It just turns out that the store was never what the fear was about.

Come out into the garden, the grill is going and it is warm. There is one thing Jesus said about Himself that is the plainest sentence in the Gospel of John.

There is no code, and there is bread

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not going to keep a woman who has fed a household through six hard years reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that fills a freezer, and nothing here is a technique. And I will say the second thing straight out, because the preaching on this goes wrong constantly: nothing in this article says a stocked freezer is a lack of faith. It is a woman managing a household. It is wisdom. Nobody is taking it off you.

But it was never going to do the thing you have been asking it to do, and I think you already know that, because you are awake at two with two freezers full.

Here is the sentence.

And Jesus said unto them, I am the bread of life: he that cometh to me shall never hunger; and he that believeth on me shall never thirst.John 6:35

He said that to a crowd who had eaten miracle bread the day before and had come back for more, which is not a criticism of them and is not one of you. They had experienced supply and they wanted supply again, which is the most natural thing in the world.

And He does not offer them a bigger supply. He does not tell them where the next five thousand loaves are coming from. He says: I am the bread. The thing you keep coming back for is a Person and not a stock.

Now hear what that does to two o'clock in the morning. The count is asking a question, and the question is not how much is there. The question is: am I going to be all right. And a freezer cannot answer that question, no matter how full it is, because it is not the kind of question a freezer answers. That is why the count comes out fine and you are still awake.

You are not going to find the answer in the store, and the question at two in the morning was never really about the store. That is not a comfort I have arranged in a garden. It is written into John 6, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes the plainest sentence in that Gospel and lays it beside a woman lying awake with everything actually covered.

You have today, and today is met, and the One who says He is the bread is not in either of those freezers. Scripture says he that cometh to me shall never hunger, and His Spirit is the one who makes a sentence like that reach the part of a woman that food has never been able to reach.

Now let me say the true thing, because we are outside and the music is on and nobody is listening.

You ate the crusts. For six years, and nobody knew, and you made sure nobody knew.

And nobody has ever thanked you for it, because a thing nobody knows about does not get thanked. So it went somewhere, and where it went was into your body, and your body has been running a count ever since at two in the morning, because that count was the only thing standing between three people and the end of the week, and nobody has ever come and taken it off you.

I am not going to be able to take it off you either, not in one evening. But somebody ought to say out loud, once, that what you did in those six years was extraordinary, and that you have never once been given credit for it, and that the reason you cannot sleep is not that you are ungrateful for what you have now.

You are not being greedy or faithless, and a woman who counted for six years to keep her children fed is not required to explain herself to anybody. Scripture says that God is not unrighteous to forget your work and labor of love, and that word forget is exactly the point, because everybody else forgot and He did not, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land somewhere real.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a count that runs on its own does not stop because somebody was kind to you at a grill. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what stocking up never does. So speak, out loud, in your own garden. You have the standing to speak to an old count and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by provision, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word much further than a fence.