The Second Flask

There are two flasks in the crate, and there have been two flasks in that crate for nine years.

Marva fills them both at the sink before the sun is properly up, one coffee and one tea, because she never knew which a person would want. Then the van: buckets, the folding table, the green tarpaulin with the mended corner, and a bucket of stocks that will be finished by ten because they always are. By the time she has the legs down there is a gray light over the square, and the whole market smells of wet cardboard and diesel and, underneath that, the flowers.

The dew is on everything. It is on the tarpaulin and the roof of the van and the rim of every bucket, and nobody put it there and nobody asked for it.

At half past eight she pours her tea. The other flask stays in the crate with the lid on.

It used to come out. It used to go over the way to whoever was standing around with cold hands, the kid on the phone case stall who never owns a coat, the woman who sells fabric and talks to everybody. Then there was a season when Marva held a man's stall for eleven Saturdays while he was in and out of the hospital with his mother, and stood his stock in her own van. At the end of it he went to the market office and said she had given up the corner. He got the corner. What he did was what he did, and this is not an article about him.

Now Marva is polite. She is not unkind. She says good morning to the whole square and means it, and if you ask the price of the stocks she will wrap them beautifully. But the thing in her that used to move before she had thought about it does not move any more, and she can tell you the exact Saturday it stopped.

And the flask still goes in the crate. Her hands pack it every week without consulting her. Nine years of a kettle boiled twice for somebody who is not coming.

Perhaps you have never stood behind a folding table in your life. But there is something your own hands still do out of a habit that has outlived its reason, and a place in you that used to move first and now waits and watches. You have noticed. You have not said it out loud to anybody, partly because there is nobody to say it to, and mostly because you are half afraid the answer is that you have simply become a harder person than you were, and the softness is not coming back.

Nobody Here Is Going To Tell You Off

Let me say the first thing plainly, because the rest of this waits on it. You are not being told off here. Nothing in you is about to be corrected, and no part of this asks you to account for how you got careful. That is not me being kind to you. It is what is written in Hosea 14, where God speaks to people who had gone a very long way off, and the first thing out of His mouth is that His anger has turned away and He will love them freely. It is His Spirit and not my sympathy that makes a sentence like that land on somebody braced for the opposite.

And then, immediately after, He says how He is going to come.

"I will be like the dew to Israel; he shall blossom like the lily; he shall take root like the trees of Lebanon."Hosea 14:5

Dew is not rain. Rain arrives with an announcement: weather in front of it, thunder behind it, and you can hear it coming across the roofs two streets away. Dew makes no sound at all. It settles in the coldest and quietest part of the night, on whatever happens to be lying there, and the bucket did not ask for it and the tarpaulin did not qualify for it.

Notice what dew does not do. It does not break the ground open to get in. It does not stand over the field inquiring why the field went hard. It does no work you can watch and it makes no case for itself, and the only evidence of it is that things which were dry are not dry now. Out of everything God could have compared Himself to while speaking to people who had gone dry, He chose the softest arrival there is.

You have not lost the thing in you that used to move first. You could not have lost it, because you never manufactured it. The written word says the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us, and poured is a wet word while given is a settled one. What was poured in has not evaporated because a man lied to a market office about a corner pitch.

Something did happen, though, and it deserves an honest name. You put a lid on. That is not the same as running out and it is not the same as going bad. A flask with the lid screwed down keeps everything that was ever in it, and keeps it hot for a surprisingly long time. It simply stops being pourable, and after a while people stop coming over, and after a longer while you begin to wonder whether there is anything under the lid at all.

The Word Goes To The Dry Thing

There is a valley in Ezekiel full of bones, and the text says twice how dry they were, as if dryness were the whole problem and anybody could see it. God asks the prophet whether they can live, and the prophet sensibly says that God knows. Then God does something that ought to strike us as strange every time and never does, because we are used to it. He does not speak to the bones Himself. He turns to a man standing in the dust and tells him to do it.

"Prophesy to these bones, and say to them, O dry bones, hear the word of the Lord."Ezekiel 37:4

Read that again with your own dryness in mind. Nobody in that valley tells the bones they should have looked after themselves better, and nobody asks them how they ended up scattered in a field. The bones are addressed as bones, and what is said over them is not a rebuke but a promise of breath.

You have the same standing in your own valley, and I want you holding it before you speak rather than after. Christ is in you and you are in Christ, which is why the words of a person like you carry any weight at all. It is written that the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you, and He is the one who makes a sentence spoken in a van or a market square into more than air moving. The authority is delegated. It is real, it is not yours to generate, and it is not withheld from the tired.

Jesus was asked once why a thing had not shifted, and He answered with a measurement: a seed so small that nobody standing there could claim to be short of it. Then He named what you do with the small thing, and it was not to feel it harder or want it more. He said speak, and say it to the mountain (Matthew 17:20). The mountain is not persuaded and it is not begged. It is addressed.

So the dryness in you gets spoken to. Not analyzed for another nine years, and not carried to the grave under good manners. Spoken to, out loud, by you, in the name of Jesus, with the Spirit of God carrying it further than the sound goes. You are the one standing in this valley with a mouth, and the standing was given to you with Christ rather than issued to you for good behavior. It is written down, in Ezekiel 37, that the man in the dust is the one told to speak, and the same Spirit who raised Jesus is in the van with you while you do it.