The Envelope In The Drawer

She was only doing the drawer because of the tape measure. That is how these things start.

Everything else was going well. Two boxes for the thrift store, one bag for the trash, one small pile of things that are not going anywhere and everybody in the family knows it. Her daughter working through the top cupboard. Her grandson, fifteen and enormous, sitting on the counter being useful in a mostly theoretical way and making them both laugh.

And in the back of the drawer, under a roll of twine and a warranty for an appliance that has been gone eleven years, an envelope.

She knew what it was before she opened it, which is its own kind of information.

A church weekend. She was twenty-six. There had been an exercise on the Saturday, and a woman named Pat who ran it and who has been dead for a long time now and who was, by every account including hers, a good and serious person.

And on the sheet, in her own handwriting, young and rounder than it is now, one word.

She stood in her kitchen at sixty-four holding it and did the sum without meaning to.

Thirty-eight years.

She has served in that word for thirty-eight years. She has volunteered for the things that word volunteers for. She has said no to two or three things that did not match it, and she remembers both of them, and she is not certain now that saying no was right.

And what she is feeling, standing there with the twine and the dead appliance warranty, is not regret exactly. It is stranger and quieter than that. It is the feeling of finding out that something you have been standing on for most of your adult life was a piece of paper you filled in yourself before you knew anything at all.

Plainly, what this is not

Let me get it said, because you have a boxful of things to sort and no patience for a runaround.

This page is not going to give you a better word. Not a corrected one, not a fuller one, not the one Pat would have written if she had known you at forty. There is no exercise coming and there is no list at the bottom for you to find yourself on.

And it is not going to be hard on Pat. She was doing a serious thing seriously with what she had, and she said what she believed, and a great many people are better off for that weekend. She is not the trouble here.

You are not living under a wrong word that needs replacing, and there is no more accurate word out there that would settle what that envelope failed to settle. That is not me being gentle with you. Scripture is what says it, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a woman classified before He would deal with her.

The sentence that runs the other way

Here is the verse I want in front of you. It is short and it is easy to walk past and it turns the whole thing around.

But if any man love God, the same is known of him.1 Corinthians 8:3

Read where the knowing is coming from.

Paul is in the middle of an argument about people who know a great deal, and he stops and says something that must have annoyed them. He does not say if a man knows God he is well informed. He says if a man loves God, that man is known of Him.

The direction is the point. All the effort in a life goes one way, toward knowing, toward working out, toward getting the word right and living up to it. And Paul says the settled thing is the traffic in the other direction, and it does not depend on your accuracy about yourself at all.

You are known of God right now, and that has been the settled fact under all thirty-eight years, whatever was written on the envelope. I am not softening that. 1 Corinthians 8:3 says the same is known of him, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lets it come to rest in a woman standing at a drawer.

What the years actually were

Now here is the part I would want said to me, so I will say it to you.

Those thirty-eight years were not wasted, and they were not a detour, and you were not living a lie.

You served. Actually served, in real rooms, for real people, most of whom will never know your name was on a list. The word on the envelope may have organized your calendar. It did not make the service unreal, and it did not make God absent from any of it.

What the paper did was give you a shape to pour it into, and the shape was too small, and you poured anyway for thirty-eight years, and He received every bit of it.

You have been seen and known through every one of those years, including the ones you spent inside a word that did not fit. The word says the one who loves God is known of Him, and the Spirit who searches all things was not standing outside the parts of your life that did not match the sheet.

The two you said no to

And now the sore part, because you have thought about it twice since you opened the envelope.

There were things you turned down because they did not match. You remember them. You are wondering, standing in that kitchen, whether you were obedient or whether you were just filed.

Here is what I will say and what I will not.

I will not tell you what they were or what would have happened. Nobody on earth can and anybody who offers to is selling something.

What I will say is that God has not been waiting thirty-eight years for you to get out of a category so He could start. He has never once been blocked by a word on a page, and He is not now.

You are not behind, and the years are not a debt, and nothing about a word you wrote at twenty-six put God on hold. That is the same sentence in 1 Corinthians 8:3 read forward, and the Spirit who has been with you the whole time did not begin work in the kitchen this afternoon.