I Have Had the Name for Three Weeks

Tonight we are making a tray of baked ziti, and it is designed to be carried.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook a pound of any short pasta three minutes short of done and drain it. While it boils, cook a chopped onion in oil for eight minutes, add three cloves of chopped garlic for a minute, then two cans of chopped tomatoes, a pinch of sugar and plenty of salt, and let it bubble down for fifteen minutes until it thickens. Stir the pasta through the sauce. Put half into a foil tray, scatter cheese, add the rest, and cover the top with more cheese than looks reasonable. Bake at 400 for twenty five minutes until it is brown on top and hot all the way through. Let it stand ten minutes before you move it, or it will slide about in the tray. It feeds six, it costs a few dollars, and it survives a car journey better than anything else in this collection.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the ziti.

It is a name written on something in your kitchen.

Somebody gave it to you three weeks ago. A person at church, or a neighbor, or a friend of a friend, who said: she is having a rough time, somebody should take her something.

And you said yes, absolutely, and you meant it entirely.

And you have thought about it every single day since. Not once have you forgotten. And every day the thing has got very slightly harder, because now there is not only a meal to deliver, there is three weeks of not having delivered it, and that has to be accounted for somehow when you turn up.

And that is how a small act of kindness turns into a thing a person avoids.

The verse with a clock in it

There is a line of Jesus about timing, and it is more urgent than it is usually read.

I must work the works of him that sent me, while it is day: the night cometh, when no man can work. (John 9:4, King James Version)

He says it in the middle of an ordinary day, standing in front of a man who needs something, with people around Him having a theological argument about whose fault it was.

And His answer to the argument is essentially: it is daylight, and there is work.

Which is not a rebuke about laziness. It is a statement about the nature of opportunity. There is a window in which a thing can be done, and windows are not permanent, and the correct response to a window is to go through it rather than to consider it.

You are standing in daylight right now, and God has never once handed somebody an opportunity and expected them to negotiate with it first. John 9:4 puts a clock over ordinary practical work rather than over anything dramatic, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen on a Tuesday.

You have not lost the window, and heaven has never once closed a door because somebody arrived at it slowly. It is written that I must work while it is day, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the sauce is thickening.

Nobody is counting the three weeks

Now let me deal with the thing that has actually grown, because it is not the task.

The task is the same size it was on the first day. A tray, an oven, a car journey.

What has grown is the explanation. There is now an imagined doorway with an account of the delay in it, and the accounting feels humiliating, and so the whole thing gets postponed again, which adds another day to the thing that has to be accounted for.

You are not too late, and God has never once closed a door because somebody arrived at it slowly. John 9:4 puts a clock over ordinary practical work and refuses a discussion in favor of doing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends the same discussion in a person's head.

Here is the truth about that doorway, and I would like you to take it seriously. She does not know. She does not know a name was passed on. She does not know somebody said yes. She has no calendar with your delay on it.

What she has is a hard month and a door that has not been knocked on.

You arriving tonight is not late. You arriving tonight is somebody arriving.

Three weeks of intention is not a verdict on a person's character.

You are not the person who did not care, and God has never once read a delay as indifference. The passage puts the work inside the available daylight rather than inside a schedule, and the Spirit of God is the one who strips away an accounting that nobody is asking for.

You have carried that name for twenty one days and never once put it down. John 9 has Jesus refuse a discussion in favor of doing the thing in front of Him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who ends a discussion in a person's head the same way.

Say nothing about the delay

Here is the practical part, and it is one rule about the doorway.

When you hand it over, do not explain.

Do not say sorry it took me so long. Do not say I have been meaning to do this for weeks. Do not mention time at all in any form.

Say: somebody said it has been a rough month, so I made too much ziti, there is enough for a couple of nights.

You are able to hand this over clean, and God has never once required a person to confess a delay before He would use them. Scripture puts it plainly in John 9:4, and the Holy Spirit carries it further than a page can: the work belongs in the daylight that is here, not the daylight that was missed.

That is it. Because the moment an apology for three weeks arrives, it puts a thing in her hands that she now has to manage. She will have to reassure somebody. And she has nothing spare for that, which is the whole reason a name got passed along in the first place.

Deliver the food and take the three weeks home with you and put it down in your own kitchen.

You are able to hand this over clean, and God has never once required a person to confess their delay before He would use them. John 9:4 has work done in the daylight available rather than in the daylight that was missed, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a plain sentence at a doorway carry the whole of it.