The Bowl You Carried Out of the Kitchen

The hall smells of gas heater and wet coats and, underneath that, of leek and potato, because it is always leek and potato and everybody knows it and nobody has ever complained.

Trestle tables in two long rows. Plastic cloths with a pattern of small yellow flowers. An urn at the end that has been on since half past ten and makes a noise like a distant motorway.

She does the kitchen. She asked for the kitchen, and she asked in a way that made it sound like a favor she was doing them, which it was not.

Behind the hatch there is a system and the system is hers. Bowls stacked to the left, ladle in the pot, cloth folded over the tap. Out there, at the tables, people say things to each other that they have been carrying since Tuesday. In here, a woman can be genuinely useful for two and a half hours and never once be asked to say anything true.

She used to be the other kind. She used to be the one who ended up crouched beside somebody in a corridor with her hand on their shoulder, praying out loud, in public, with strangers walking past. It came out of her the way water comes out of a tap. She never planned a word of it and she never had to.

Then, somewhere in the last few years, the tap ran dry. Not dramatically. There was no crisis and no falling out. She simply opened her mouth one afternoon beside somebody who needed it and there was nothing in there, and she said something with the shape of a prayer and the weight of a greetings card, and she heard herself do it, and she has not offered since.

So: the kitchen. The kitchen is a very reasonable place to be. Nobody in the kitchen has to find words.

It is a quarter to two and the chairs are going up on the tables when a man comes in, soaked, hovering by the door as if he might not stay. Everyone is packing. The pans are done and the cloth is folded over the tap.

There is one portion left in the bottom of the pot.

And this is where I am going to hand the story to you, because you know the exact weight of that ladle.

You carried the bowl out. You did not plan to sit down and you sat down. He talked for a while about a week that had got away from him and you said almost nothing, which is not a technique you had chosen, it was simply all you had.

At the end of it he asked you to pray.

And nothing arrived. No paragraph, no flow, none of the old water. You put your hand on the table near his and you said nine words, the plainest nine you owned, and one of them was his name and one of them was the Lord's.

He put his head down and cried in a village hall at two o'clock in the afternoon, and you sat there, dry as a stick, with a tea towel still over your shoulder.

The words were never the gift

I want to say the tender thing before I say the true one, because they are the same thing here.

Losing the fluency was a real loss and I am not going to talk you out of grieving it. Something that used to run easily stopped running, and the quiet where it used to be has been its own kind of bereavement. That is worth naming rather than skipping past.

But grief made a wrong deduction, and the deduction is what has kept you behind the hatch for years.

You are not decommissioned, and nothing has been taken back off you. Scripture says the gifts and calling of God are without repentance, which means He does not change His mind about what He put in a person, and the Holy Spirit who set it there in the first place has not spent these quiet years quietly packing it away.

For the gifts and calling of God are without repentance.Romans 11:29

Read that as a legal sentence, because that is what it is. It is not encouragement. It is a statement about the character of the Giver, and it settles the question of whether an anointing lapses in a person who has gone dry, and it settles it against every feeling you have had about yourself since the afternoon the tap failed.

And you were never the source of the words, which is exactly why their absence proves nothing. Romans 8:26 says that the Spirit Himself maketh intercession for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, and I want you to notice that Scripture puts the deepest praying that happens in a human being in the category of things with no words in them at all. That was never a downgrade. It was always where the real work was.

Anointing is not a rank you fell out of

Here is a thought that has probably been sitting in you without ever being said out loud: that other people have this properly and you had a borrowed version of it for a while.

That idea has to go, and it has to go on doctrinal grounds and not on kind ones. There is no league in this. There is no tier, no grade, no register of the properly anointed with your name crossed off it in pencil. The oil in Scripture is poured on heads, not awarded to finalists.

You have the anointing still, present tense, in your hands, in a kitchen, with a tea towel over your shoulder. John writes that the anointing which ye have received of Him abideth in you, and the word he chose was abideth, which is the language of staying rather than the language of visiting, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who is that abiding presence and not a mood that came and went with your fluency.

So the corridor was never about your eloquence. The corridor was about a person who was suddenly not alone, and the thing that made them not alone came through you rather than from you.

You have been carrying this the entire time you believed it was gone. It is written that God worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure, and the willing came first in that sentence, which is why the ache you have felt every time you walked past somebody who needed praying with was never an accusation, it was the Spirit of God still moving the same equipment He installed.