A Portion for the One Who Prepared Everything

The doors at arrivals only ever do two things, and after enough years at this barrier you can read them from thirty feet.

They open on somebody who is looking for a face and finds it, and a shout goes up, and half the barrier claps for people they will never see again. Or they open on somebody nobody has come for, who does not break stride and looks at a phone with nothing on it.

She has the tin of biscuits her brother likes in a bag at her feet, because you do not collect a person off a nine hour flight with empty hands. To her left a woman has a balloon on a stick and two children who have been told twice to stop hitting each other with it. Behind her somebody is holding forecourt carnations still in the cellophane. It is the gladdest room in the building, and every person in it is holding something they prepared for somebody else.

In her family she is the one who does this: the collections, the cakes, the cards signed on everybody's behalf, the hospital visits nobody else can face. Eight months her brother has been away. In the last hour she has watched about forty reunions happen four feet in front of her, and she clapped for two, and felt nothing at all for either, and that is the part she has never said to a living soul. When those doors open on him she will do it beautifully. She always does. That is not the same thing as being glad, and she has known the difference longer than she would like to say.

You know that difference. You have been doing it beautifully for years, and nobody in your family has the faintest idea.

The one for whom nothing is prepared

There is a feast in the book of Nehemiah and almost nobody reads it for the food.

The people have come back to a broken city. The wall is barely standing. A man reads them the Law out loud from a wooden platform, morning until midday, and they weep, because they are hearing at last what they had been living beside without knowing it was theirs. And into all that crying, this is what is said.

Go your way, eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared: for this day is holy unto our Lord: neither be ye sorry; for the joy of the LORD is your strength.Nehemiah 8:10

Everybody quotes the last six words. Read the four in front of them instead.

The joy of the LORD. Not the joy of the people who had a good year. Not the joy of whoever felt it first. His. If the gladness that holds a person up were theirs to manufacture the sentence would have said so, and it would have been cruel, because the crowd it was spoken over was standing there with wet faces.

And the line about not being sorry was never a rebuke aimed at tears. Look at what it is attached to. A table. Eat the fat, drink the sweet, carry a plate to somebody with nothing ready at home. The remedy handed to a weeping city was not an instruction to feel better by an agreed hour. It was food, a job of carrying it to somebody else, and a day marked holy so nobody had to earn their place. Read what happened next: they went off to eat and drink and send portions and make great mirth, because they had understood the words declared to them. The gladness came after the word landed. It arrived. It was never the entrance fee.

Now here is the hinge, and it has been standing at that barrier all evening. Portions were carried that day to the people for whom nothing was prepared. And in most families there is one person for whom nothing is ever prepared, and it is nearly always the person who prepares everything.

That is you, at the front of the crowd, with somebody else's biscuits in a bag.

And you have a portion in that instruction, not only a job carrying it. Nehemiah 8:10 says eat the fat, and drink the sweet, and send portions unto them for whom nothing is prepared, and the eating is written before the sending rather than after it, and the Spirit is the one who makes a sentence about a table four hundred years before Christ arrive at a barrier at eleven at night.

Let me say the weight out loud, since you have not. You are not sad, exactly. Sad has a shape and an end and other people can see it. What you are is level. You get up, you do the day, you are kind, you are good in a crisis, and somewhere in the last few years the color went out of the middle of the afternoon and you never reported it, because what would you even say. Nothing is wrong. That is the strange part. Nothing is wrong, and you cannot remember the last time you were actually glad about anything.

Coping is not a sin, and a flat year is not a verdict on your faith.

And you are not being assessed for how you have felt this year. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart, and nigh is a statement about His position rather than about your mood, and the Spirit is the one who stays close in a flat month without once asking a person to perform a feeling they do not have. You did not mislay your gladness through carelessness, the way a person mislays a set of keys. You spent it. One of those is a fault and the other is a bill somebody in the family had to pay, and you were the one standing closest when it came.

And if the flatness has gone further, if it has begun to include thoughts about not being here at all, that is not a lack of faith and it is not something to carry alone. Tell one person tonight, or your doctor tomorrow, and let somebody else do the collecting for a while. Heaven has never once been offended by help.

The God who made a feast the medicine for a weeping city has not since changed His mind about tables. He did not hand out gladness one afternoon in Jerusalem and then close the kitchen. It still goes out, and people still get handed something they did not cook. The harder thing to believe is that it is for you. Not the rested version of you, or the one who has finally caught up. You. At the barrier. Tonight, in the noise, with the doors going.

Jesus measured what it takes to move a mountain, and it came out smaller than anything you have ever carried for anybody. What Scripture records Him asking for was not a warmer feeling about it but a word said straight at it, out loud, by whoever is standing nearest, and the Spirit is the one who carries it once it leaves a mouth, so tonight that mouth is yours. Your mountain is not made of grief. It is made of habit: years of quiet agreement that gladness belongs to the people you collect and the carrying belongs to you. You are allowed to say something out loud to that.