The Rest I Thought I Had Earned

Verlie turned seventy-one in March, and somewhere in the week after her birthday she caught herself waiting for something, and it took her most of a month to work out what.

She had been the one you called. That is not a boast, it is just the arrangement, and it had been the arrangement since she was about twenty-six and her sister's marriage went the way it went.

She had raised two of her own and most of a third who was her brother's. She had done nights with her mother for the last two years of it. She had done the same for her mother-in-law, who never once liked her. She kept a spare key to four houses and a list of hospital numbers on the inside of a cupboard door, and every single person on that list had rung her at some hour that had a two in front of it.

And she had never once said no. Not once in forty-five years.

Somewhere in there, and she could not tell you when, she had come to believe that there was a season at the end of it. Not a reward exactly. Just a stretch of years where somebody would come and sit with her, and it would be her turn, and she would not have to do the coffee.

It has not come.

Her brother's boy rang in April to ask if she could take a delivery. Her daughter rang the same week to ask about the weekend. And on a Tuesday in May she was standing at her own stove making a casserole for a woman down the road who had had a fall, and she said out loud, to a pot: when is anybody going to do this for me.

And the shame came in right behind it, hot, the way it always does, because Verlie has said all her life that you do not keep accounts, and she meant it every single time she said it.

She did not tell a soul.

What finally cracked her was the woman down the road, who is eighty-four and has no idea about any of it, who took the casserole at the door and then would not let go of the dish. She held onto it with Verlie still holding the other side and said: no. Come in. You are going to sit down in my kitchen and I am going to make you a cup of tea and you are not going to lift a finger. Do you hear me.

You are not going to lift a finger.

Verlie stood in a stranger's doorway holding one end of a casserole dish and found her eyes had gone, and she could not have explained it to one soul in three families.

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

She thought: I have been waiting forty-five years for a turn, and somebody just handed me a chair without being asked.

Say the word plain first

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 return, not what is owed. 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 it is not a smaller helping put in front of the women whose turn never came.

And let me be as plain the other way. Money is not wicked, wanting a rest is not a sin, and forty-five years of answering the phone at two in the morning is not something anybody should apologize for. Nothing on this page ever ties what God does to what a body has or gives, and that wire is not run here and it will not be. If you are truly short, if there is a date and a figure and a knot in your stomach, that is a real thing and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that.

And whoever taught you that carrying earns a rest, and somebody did, without ever putting it into a sentence, is not on trial here. Most of them were carrying too. What I want to look at is the arrangement, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

He offered it at the start, not at the finish

Jesus says one invitation that most people have heard so often they have stopped hearing it, and the Holy Spirit has been carrying it to tired women for two thousand years.

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.Matthew 11:28-30

Read who it is addressed to. All who labor and are heavy laden. Not all who have finished. Not all who have put in the years. He addresses people in the middle of carrying something, while they are still under it, and He offers the rest right then.

That matters more than anything else in this article, so I will say it plain. The rest was never at the end of the road. It was offered at the start of it, and again in the middle of it, and it has been offered every single one of those forty-five years, on a Tuesday in May, at the stove, with a casserole in the oven.

You are not a selfish woman for what you said to that pot. You are somebody who was carrying a genuine weight and had been given no way to put it down, and the written word does not scold anybody for that. It comes and offers a hand under it, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that offer land in a kitchen instead of staying on a page.

And here is what costs something to say. If God had been running an arrangement where forty-five years buys a rest, you would have every right to your complaint at that stove. The reason the complaint has nowhere to go is not that you carried it badly. It is that He was never withholding the rest until you had earned it. He has been holding it out the whole time, at eye level, saying come.

What the forty-five years were actually doing

You are being offered rest right now, and that is not a consolation being handed over now that you are seventy-one. His word says come to me, present tense, addressed to people still under the load, and His Spirit is the one who makes that a real offer in a kitchen rather than a nice sentence in a book.

Think about what actually broke you open. It wasn't the casserole. You've made hundreds of casseroles.

It was an old woman holding the other side of a dish and refusing to let you leave. It was somebody deciding, without being asked and without you earning it, that it was your turn. You were starving to be sat down. You still are, and at seventy-one there is nothing indulgent about it.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. Every night with your mother was seen. Every hour with a woman who never liked you was seen. Not one of them bought a rest, and not one of them was wasted, and both of those are true at the same time. Jesus sat down at a well because He was tired, in the middle of the work, and the Bible says so without one word of apology for Him, and He was in that doorway holding the other end of the dish.