The Last of Anything

Loretta is seventy-eight and there is a full pantry in that house and she has not eaten the last of anything since Eisenhower.

It is not a joke in the family, because nobody in the family knows. It is one of those things a person does without ever once seeing herself do it.

There is always one left. One egg in the carton. A finger of milk in the jug. Two crackers in the sleeve, never one, never none. If she takes the second to last of something she will stand there and put it back and take something else, and she has never in her life said a sentence to herself about it.

The pantry is full. She keeps a good pantry and always has. Her husband's pension came through fine. The porch was fixed last fall by a nephew who would not take money for it.

She was nine the year it was bad. Nine going on ten. There were four of them and her mother, and she remembers exactly one instruction from that whole year, given quietly and only once, and never repeated because it never needed to be: leave a little in it, honey. So it doesn't look empty.

Leave a little in it so it does not look empty.

She has been leaving a little in everything for sixty-nine years.

What got her was her great-granddaughter, who is six and was staying the weekend, and who reached into the cracker sleeve, took the last two, ate them both, and said, with her mouth full and no thought in her head whatsoever: can we get more?

Can we get more.

Loretta stood at her own counter and had to put a hand on it, and she could not have told a soul in that house why.

And the sentence that came to her, standing there, had nothing to do with crackers.

She thought: I have been keeping a house that does not look empty for sixty-nine years, and a six year old just asked the question I was never allowed to ask.

Say the word plain

Before we go on I want to say plain what this site means by wealth, because it is a slippery word and I would rather be understood than admired.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a pantry, not a jug with a finger left in it. A portion is the old table word for what gets set down in front of a body because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that plain word and does a startling thing with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only meaning the word carries here.

And this piece is written for one particular woman, so let me be exact about her. She has plenty and she cannot touch the bottom of it. If your pantry is genuinely near empty, if leaving a little in it is not a reflex this month but a plan, then nothing on this page is asking you to make peace with that, and any article that did would deserve throwing out. Real lack is real and it wants a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is a full pantry and a hand that will not take the last of anything, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

You are not outside this. The written word says it about you, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old line about somebody else read as a line about you.

He taught them to ask a day at a time

The prayer Jesus taught has one line about food in it, and the whole thing turns on a word most people go straight past.

Give us this day our daily bread.Matthew 6:11

This day. Daily. He says it twice in five words, which is not an accident and is not poetry.

He could have taught them to ask for the week. He could have taught them to ask for a store, and no one would have thought it greedy. He taught them to ask for a day, out loud, to a Father, and to come back tomorrow and ask again.

Now, that would be a cruel thing to teach if the Father were unreliable, and this is the part that matters for a woman who was nine in a bad year. The reason a day at a time is safe is that the One being asked has never once been short. The asking is daily because the relationship is daily, not because the supply is thin.

You are not a strange old woman for the cracker sleeve. You are somebody who was given one quiet instruction at nine years old by a mother trying to protect four children from the look of an empty shelf, and you have kept it faithfully for sixty-nine years. There is not one word of criticism in this article for that woman or for you. The written word does not scold anybody for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between agreeing with a prayer and a hand actually taking the last two.

And here is what is true of you this evening, in that kitchen: you have today, and the word says to ask for this day's bread and to come back in the morning, and His Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a hand at a counter.

What the little bit left in it is for

Think about what got you at that counter. It wasn't the crackers. There is a whole box.

It was: can we get more. It was a six year old who has never once in her life wondered whether there would be more, asking the question out loud with her mouth full. You were starving to be a person who could ask that, and you still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the reflex. The finger of milk in the jug is not for anybody to drink. It is there so the jug does not look empty, and a jug that does not look empty means a house that is all right, and a house that is all right means a mother who does not make that sound in the next room.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never responsible for making the house look all right. That job was given to a nine year old who should never have been handed it, and God did not hand it to her. Jesus fed thousands of people on a hillside and then had the leftovers gathered up, and He was in that kitchen before your great-granddaughter reached into the box.