One Plate at the Sink

There is one plate, one fork, one knife she did not need, and a pan, and that is the whole of the washing up, and it takes about four minutes.

Ruth has been making the same supper for forty one years and she has not managed to make less of it. She still buys for two at the store and she is not going to pretend to you that she does not know she is doing it. So there is a container in the fridge with tomorrow in it, and there always is, and she eats it Thursday.

Six o'clock is the hour. Not the night. The night is fine, the night has the television and the crossword and eventually sleep. Six o'clock is when the kitchen used to fill up: the door, the boots, the same three remarks about the same three things, a chair going back. And now at six there is a woman at a sink with one plate and a window going dark over the yard, and the house is not silent, the house is loud, because a house is at its loudest with the exact person who is not in it.

There was a stretch where she had a way through six o'clock. It was in the cupboard over the icebox and it was, if she is honest, the reason she got the supper over with quickly. She has not gone to that cupboard in a long while and it is not there anymore. She does not want it back. But she will tell you, plainly, because plain is all she has ever had: taking it out did not put anything in.

So four minutes at the sink. Then the towel. Then the chair.

Nothing is wrong. Nothing at all is wrong. That is the shape of this particular hardness: there is no emergency in it, and there is no end to it either, and nobody sends a card at six o'clock on an ordinary Tuesday in the fourth year.

You know the hour. Maybe it is not a sink. Maybe it is the door you come home through, or the second side of the bed, or the place at the table. Nothing has happened. It is simply the hour that is shaped like somebody, and you have to go through it, and then you have to do it again tomorrow.

You are standing in a day that was made and handed over, and you were not left to scrape one together out of what is missing. The psalm says this is the day which the Lord hath made, and made is a builder's word, deliberate and unhurried; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that true of a Tuesday with one plate in the water and not only of the days a person would have chosen.

This is the day which the Lord hath made

Let me say the plain thing about this hour before I say anything hopeful, because I have no patience for a comfort that will not first admit what it is comforting.

Six o'clock is not lonely in the general way. It is lonely in one specific way, shaped like one specific person, and general comfort slides straight off it. And the second thing, which people do not say: taking away the thing you used to get through it with does not fill the hour. It empties it further. That is the honest arithmetic and pretending otherwise helps nobody. You have made a good and right decision and it has left you standing at a sink with four minutes of washing up and an evening that has to be lived in.

Now here is the verse, and I want to look at one word in it.

This is the day which the Lord hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.Psalm 118:24

Hath made. Not permitted, not allowed, not let happen. Made. It is the same class of word as the making of the light and the making of the dry land: a thing built on purpose by somebody who intended it. That is what is being said about this Tuesday. Not about a better Tuesday coming. About the one with the one plate in it.

You have been handed a made thing and you were never given a leftover, and you have that on the days nobody would have picked. That is written in Psalm 118, and the Holy Spirit is the one who presses it into an evening that feels like an accident rather than a gift.

And look where the psalm sits. It comes a few lines after the stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. The whole psalm is about something everybody wrote off turning out to be the thing the building rests on. That is the neighborhood this verse lives in. It is not a sunny little verse for a good day. It is a verse that came up out of rejection and got put in the middle of a song about it.

You are living inside a psalm that was written from the refused side of things, and you were never being addressed only in your good years. Scripture puts the made day right next to the refused stone, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person from reading a hard evening as evidence that they got left out of the sentence.

Then, we will rejoice and be glad in it. Notice it is a decision and not a feeling report. Nobody says we will rejoice about something they are already rejoicing about. It is said out loud in advance, by people who are choosing the direction before the feeling arrives, which is the only order in which it has ever been available to anybody.

You are able to choose gladness inside a real ache, and you were never asked to feel it first or to pretend the ache is not there. The written word says we will rejoice, in the future and in the will, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a decision made at a sink into something that actually holds by the time you get to the chair.

And the plain word, the same one I would say to you in my own kitchen: the neighbor girl who comes by, the friend, the doctor, the counselor, the group in the church basement, that is God's kindness with a face on it, and using it is not a lesser faith. He has fed a great many widows through somebody else's hands and He has never once been embarrassed about it.