The Dish Left On Her Own Step

Somebody has left a dish on the top step.

Faye sees it through the screen door at about a quarter past seven, on her way out to bring the chair cushions in before the dew. It is a white oval dish with blue around the rim, and there is a dish towel folded over the top of it, and it has not been there long, because the towel is still standing up in that soft way a towel does when there is steam under it.

She stops with her hand on the door.

Thirty years. That is how long this porch has run one direction. Thirty years of Faye going down her own steps with something wrapped in a towel on her forearm, out to the truck, up somebody else's walk, and back. She could tell you which houses have the good gravel and which ones you park at the road for. She knows whose dog barks. She has left food on steps in six different kinds of weather and she has never once waited to be thanked, because waiting to be thanked would have meant standing there, and she was never a stander.

And now there is a dish on her step.

It has been a hard month. Some of it the road knows about, because a road always knows something, and some of it nobody knows at all and nobody is going to. She has not cooked properly in two weeks. There is a cereal bowl in the sink and half a loaf going stale on the counter and she has not really minded, and the not minding is probably the part that would worry a person who loved her.

She stands at the screen door and looks at that white oval dish.

Out past the porch the evening is doing what an evening does in September. Long gold light coming under the trees at the bottom of the field. Two swallows going after something over the mown grass. The tractor sound from the next place over, and then it quits, and then it is just crickets warming up.

She does not go out.

She tells herself she will get it in a minute. Then she goes and stands in the kitchen with the light off, and comes back, and it is still there.

At half past eight she brings in the cushions and steps right over it.

At nine she turns off the porch light and the dish is still on the step in the dark, with the towel gone flat now, and Faye lies in bed knowing exactly where it is, the way you know where a splinter is.

She cannot tell you why she cannot pick it up. She only knows that in thirty years she has never once been on this end of a porch step, and there is no procedure in her for it.

Maybe you have never carried a covered dish anywhere in your life. But you know what it is to be the one who does the carrying, and you know the particular helplessness of the week when there is nothing in you to carry with. And you know the thing nobody says out loud, which is that being on the receiving end of a kindness does not feel like relief. It feels like being seen in a state you had not planned on being seen in.

You Do Not Know How To Be On This End

Let us start with the true and ordinary thing, because it is not a character flaw and I am not going to treat it like one.

You have thirty years of practice at one direction and about four minutes of practice at the other. That is all this is. A person who has spent three decades on the giving end of a porch step has built up an entire body of skill, and not one hour of it is any use standing at a screen door looking down at a covered dish.

You are not proud, and you are not stubborn, and you are out of practice. The Spirit has been standing at that screen door with you the whole evening, and it is written into Psalm 103:14 in words that do not flatter anybody: He knows our frame.

"Like as a father pitieth his children, so the LORD pitieth them that fear him. For he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust."Psalm 103:13-14

Sit with the second half of that a minute, because most of us read past it in a hurry.

He knows what we are made of. He is not working from an estimate. When you cannot get off the step tonight, when there is a cereal bowl in the sink and half a loaf going stale, God is not upstairs revising His opinion of you downward. He knew the material before He ever handed you a thing to carry with it, and the knowing has never once cooled Him toward you.

You have been afraid of being seen in a bad month by a God who has known the whole time. That is Scripture, not comfort talk, and the Holy Spirit is what makes it hold at nine o'clock in a dark bedroom.

Dust Is Not An Insult

The word the psalm uses is dust, and a tired woman can take that as a demotion if nobody stops her, so let me stop you.

Look at who is speaking and how. This is a father, bending down. Like as a father pitieth his children. Pity in that old sense is not condescension, it is the ache a parent gets in the chest, the thing that moves before anybody has explained anything. And what does the father know about the child? That the child is small. That the child gets tired at a predictable hour. That there is a limit in there, and it arrives, and it is not naughtiness.

You were made with a limit in you, and reaching it has never once been a fault in the workmanship. Psalm 103:13 already said what He is like toward His own, and the Spirit is not out there on the step waiting for you to be useful again before any of it applies.

Which brings us to the thing this article is not going to say. Nobody here is telling you to take the dish so you can get your strength up and get back out there. That is not what is happening on your porch. If the receiving is only a refueling stop on the way to more carrying, then it is not mercy, it is maintenance, and you have been maintained quite enough.

You are being cared for tonight, full stop, with nothing on the other side of it. Two things say so and neither of them is me. His word, which remembers that we are dust. And the Spirit, who carries a line like that through a screen door and into a kitchen with the light off.

There is no clause after it. No when you are back on your feet. No so that. A father who bends down to a tired child is not investing.