The Freezer in the Back Room

The chest freezer is in the back room under the window, and there is a torch on the sill because the bulb went and neither of them ever got round to it.

She counted last Tuesday. She did not mean to count. She was looking for the pastry and she started shifting bags and then she was counting, and there are forty one bags of beans in there. Forty one. Plus the plums. Plus the apple, in the round tubs, from the year the tree did what it did.

There was a time she never had a full freezer, and it was not because she grew less. It was because things left this house continually. Anybody who came got sent off with something. The girl who did her hair. The man who came about the guttering. Her sister, every single visit, with a bag on the passenger seat that she made a joke about and took anyway. That was how the produce got used. It went out.

He died in the March.

She has not stopped gardening. That is the strange part. She put the beans in as usual, she staked the tomatoes, she has done the plums for two summers running. It all still comes in. It just does not go out any more.

She stood there on Tuesday with the lid up and the cold coming off it and the torch in her hand, and she thought: who is all of this for.

And then she shut the lid, because that is not a question you want an answer to on a Tuesday afternoon.

You know that back room. Yours might be a cupboard. It might be money that has stopped moving. It might be a habit of buying two of things. Maybe there is no freezer anywhere in your life and you simply notice that things come into your house now and nothing much leaves it, and you did not decide that, it started when something happened, and it has kept going long after the something.

Sit down at the table. Put the torch down. There is an old line I want to read you, and it is short, and it will not ask you for more than you have.

There is no code, and there is an open hand

Let me say it plain first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I will not sit here letting a good woman wait for one.

There is no code. There is nothing you do with a bag of beans that unlocks anything. There is no arrangement of Scripture about money that pays a person back for what they sent out, and if there were, then the whole of it would be a trade and not a kindness, and I have known the difference since I was a girl and so have you.

What is in this book is one line, and it is plainer than most people preach it.

For the poor shall never cease out of the land: therefore I command thee, saying, Thou shalt open thine hand wide unto thy brother, to thy poor, and to thy needy, in thy land.Deuteronomy 15:11

Notice what it does not do. There is no figure in it. No percentage, no schedule, no list of who qualifies. God does not tell them how much and He does not tell them how often. He tells them what to do with a hand.

And notice the first half, which people skip. The poor shall never cease out of the land. That is not despair, it is honesty. He is saying: this will not be finished by you. You are not being asked to fix it. There will still be need in this land when you are gone, and your part is not the solving of it. Your part is the shape of your hand.

You were never asked to solve anything, and one edge of what you grow was never yours to store. That is not a soft thing I am saying because I am fond of you. It is written into the fifteenth of Deuteronomy, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a command given to farmers and lays it across a chest freezer with the lid up.

You have a God who does the measuring in this house, and He has never once handed that job to you. Scripture says that He is the one who gives seed to the sower and bread to the eater, and His Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and works on a hand rather than on a conscience.

Now I will say the true thing, because you and I are too old to be careful with each other.

The freezer did not fill because you turned mean. It filled because in the March you lost the person things went out with. He was the one who walked the bag to the car. He was the one who said, take some of these, while you were still saying it was nothing. The going out was something the two of you did, and when he stopped, it stopped, and there has been nobody in this house to do the other half.

That is not stinginess. That is a widow with a whole system that had two people in it and now has one.

You are not a closed woman, and nothing about the March was a failure in you. Scripture never once rebukes the one whose hands have gone quiet in grief, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can open a hand without saying a single hard word to it.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because a freezer does not empty because an old woman had a sad Tuesday. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what quiet enduring never does. So say it out loud, here, in your own back room. You have the standing to speak to a heaviness in your own house and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position and not by long service, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a torch beam.