The Shelf Would Not Take Another Tin

He does the big shop on a Thursday evening because the aisles are quiet and the trolleys are all still in the bay.

He is not extravagant. Ask anybody. He knows what things cost, he does not waste, and he has never in his life bought something because it looked nice on a shelf. What he does is buy the second one.

Second bag of flour. Second box of the cereal the youngest actually eats. Tins: tomatoes, beans, the soup nobody likes but which keeps. He does it without deciding to. His hand goes out and takes two, and the part of him that would notice a decision is somewhere else entirely, thinking about the car or the weekend.

Nine o'clock, unpacking, and he opens the cupboard under the stairs.

The shelf will not take another tin.

He stands there for a moment with a tin of chopped tomatoes in his hand, in a warm kitchen, with the dishwasher going and somebody's program on in the front room, and there is nowhere to put it. He tries turning it on its side. He tries the shelf above, which is where the tall things live and it will not sit properly there either.

His son comes in for a glass of water and says, without stopping and without any weight in it at all, "We've got about nine of those, Dad."

And then he goes back out, and the tap is still dripping, and you are standing in your own kitchen holding a tin.

Because there was a winter. You were younger. The arithmetic did not work that year and it did not work the year after, and you did things in that period that you have never described to anybody, and it came right eventually the way things sometimes do.

That was a long time ago. It has been fine for a long time. By any measure a reasonable person would use, there is enough, and there has been enough for years, and everyone who knows you would say so without hesitating.

And the number has never once become safe.

A number can be large

Let me say two things before anything else, and the second one matters more than the first.

The first is that nothing on this page is going to ask anything of what sits in that cupboard. No exchange is being proposed in either direction. Nothing here connects what God does with what a man hands over, because that arithmetic is not in the book and it has done a great deal of harm in houses like yours.

The second is this. Your cupboard is not a report on your faith. It never has been, in either direction, and any voice that has quietly suggested otherwise to you at nine in the evening was not the Holy Spirit. A full shelf proves nothing about a man and an empty one proves nothing either, and the whole of what follows applies exactly the same to both.

Let your conversation be without covetousness; and be content with such things as ye have: for he hath said, I will never leave thee, nor forsake thee.Hebrews 13:5

Now read the joint in the middle of that verse, the little word for, because everything is hanging off it. The writer says be content, and then he gives the reason, and you would expect the reason to be about supply. It is not. The reason is a sentence about a Person who does not leave.

The Greek there stacks its negatives up in a way English refuses to carry, which is why translators end up using never twice and still feel they have undersold it. The promise is not that there will be an amount. The promise is that there will be a Him.

You are held by a promise that is not a quantity. Hebrews 13:5 grounds contentment in the fact that He said He would never leave, not in the state of anybody's cupboard, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this paragraph who makes that reach a man standing under the stairs at nine at night with a tin in his hand.

Here is the whole difficulty in one line. A number can be large. It cannot be loyal.

A quantity has been asked to do a relational job, and it cannot do it, and the size of the quantity has nothing to do with why. Any figure, held by anybody, has the same defect: it can go. That is not pessimism, it is arithmetic, and some part of a man worked it out during that winter and has never been able to unlearn it. So the number rises and the safety does not arrive, and the quiet conclusion is that the number is not big enough yet.

It was never going to be. Not because the amount is too small. Because safety is not the kind of thing a number is made of.

The winter is still running the cupboard

Now the gentler half, and this is where the actual weight is.

That winter taught your hands a rule, and the rule outlived the winter by a very long way. Buy two. Keep the tall things separate. Never let the shelf get low. Your hands learned it when the learning was true and necessary, and hands are slower than heads at hearing that a season has ended.

That is not greed and it is not weakness of faith and it is certainly not a fault to be repented of. It is a man's body remembering something on his behalf, which is mostly a kindness, and which in this one respect has been keeping him awake.

You were kept through that year, and it was not the shelf that kept you. Luke 12:24 has Jesus pointing at ravens that neither sow nor reap and have neither storehouse nor barn, and the point He draws from it is that the Father knows, and the Spirit is the one who takes that from being a pretty line about birds and makes it a fact about a winter you have never described to anybody.

And look at what happens next in that chapter, because it is exactly your situation and almost nobody notices. The man in the story has a good harvest. Nothing is wrong with the harvest. What he does is pull down his barns and build greater, and what Jesus says about him is not that he was rich but that he was not rich toward God. Jesus had already said it plainly a few verses earlier: a man's life does not consist in the abundance of the things he possesses.

You have a life that Jesus said does not consist in the abundance of things. Luke 12:15 says it in those words, and He said it to a crowd containing every sort of person rather than to the comfortable ones only, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it stop being a rebuke and start being an enormous relief.

Read it that way round. If your life does not consist in the things, then the things were never carrying your life, which means they have not been failing at it either. The shelf has not let you down. It was never load-bearing.

And you have a peace on offer that no figure was ever able to issue. John 14:27 has Jesus saying my peace I give unto you, not as the world giveth, and He hands it over as something already His to give rather than something a good year produces, and the Spirit is the one who makes that arrive in a kitchen instead of staying in a Gospel.

One more thing, from a man who had been on both sides of this. Paul writes that he has learned to be abased and learned to abound, and the word he uses is the word for being let into a secret through instruction. He had to be taught how to have plenty. Nobody ever says that out loud. Everybody assumes abundance arrives with its own instructions, and it does not, and a man can reach enough with no idea at all how to live in it.

You were never left to work that out on your own. Philippians 4:12 has Paul saying he learned it, which means somebody taught him, and Scripture puts that teaching in the hands of the Spirit rather than in the hands of a good year, and the Holy Spirit is an unhurried teacher with a man whose hands took their rule from a hard winter.