The Rack He Keeps Filled

It is wooden and it holds nine and it lives on the counter between the kettle and the window, and it is usually about two thirds full, and it has been there since before they had children.

Mark is a good man. Kate would like that established before anything else, because everything in this story that sounds like a complaint is not one.

He drinks about four glasses a week. He has never in twenty years been anything other than completely fine about it, and when she stopped he said, do you want me to get rid of it, and he meant it, and she said no, and she meant that too, because she is not going to be a woman who rearranges a house around herself.

So the rack stays on the counter, between the kettle and the window, at the exact eye level of a woman making supper.

Every evening from about five, she is in that kitchen. The kettle is on that side. She passes it about forty times between five and seven. It is not a crisis and it is not a temptation in the dramatic sense; it is simply that the hardest hour of her day and the most looked at object in her house are in the same three feet of counter, five days a week, forever.

She has never once mentioned it to him after that first conversation.

You know that object. It might be a rack, a fridge shelf, a cupboard, a cabinet in a front room. Nobody is doing anything wrong. It is just that your house has not changed and you have, and you have to live in the house.

You are able to declare for yourself without the room agreeing first, and you were never handed a choice that depended on anybody else. Joshua stood in front of a whole nation and said as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord, and he said it before they had decided anything; that is exactly what stands written, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that available to a woman standing at a counter at five in the evening.

As for me and my house

Let me name the difficulty exactly, because it is not the one anybody would guess.

The difficulty is not desire. If it were desire you would have asked him to move it, and he would have moved it that afternoon. The difficulty is that you have decided, correctly and for good reasons, not to make your family carry your day, and the cost of that decision is that you get no help from your surroundings at all. Your kitchen is neutral. Your kitchen was never asked to be on your side. And you stand in it for two hours every evening being the only thing in the room that has changed.

And I want to be clear: nothing in this article is going to tell you to demand anything. Not to ask him to move it, not to make the kitchen different, not to require your family to arrange themselves around this. If you ever do choose to say something, that is between you and him and people who know you both, and it is not a condition of anything here.

So here is Joshua, at the end of his life, in front of the whole nation.

And if it seem evil unto you to serve the Lord, choose you this day whom ye will serve... but as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.Joshua 24:15

Look at the structure of that. He puts the choice to them, genuinely, without pressure, and he does not wait for the result. He states his own position, out loud, in the same breath, before a single one of them has answered.

You are able to state your own position while the room is still undecided, and you were never required to secure agreement first. That is what stands written in Joshua 24, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that a live move for a woman between a kettle and a window.

And notice the phrase me and my house. He is not describing what everybody in his household currently thinks. He is declaring the orientation of the household as its own responsibility, taken by him, and there is nothing in the text about a family meeting or a vote. A declaration is not a report on the consensus. It is a thing a person says and then lives.

You are declaring rather than reporting, and you were never obliged to have the household in agreement before you could speak. Scripture puts the declaration first and the nation's answer afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that order usable in an ordinary kitchen.

And here is what makes this land at five in the evening: Joshua's declaration did not change the room. Those people had gods in their houses; he says so, two verses later, and tells them to put them away, and the whole scene happens in a country full of them. His sentence was not a statement about what was in the buildings. It was a statement about who he was going to serve while standing among them.

You are declaring who you serve inside the room as it is, and you were never waiting for a house with nothing in it. The written word puts that declaration in a landscape that had not been cleared, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it work three feet from a wine rack.

And the plain thing, said the way this site says it every time. Two years of standing in that kitchen without mentioning it to anybody is a lot to carry silently, and it is worth telling somebody who is not in the house. A friend, a counselor, your doctor, the room where people say true things out loud. That is God's kindness with a face on it, and it is not disloyalty to Mark.