The Kettle at Four in the Afternoon

She boils it at four. Every afternoon, and she has not missed one since the March before last.

Two mugs. His is the green one with the chip out of the rim that she has been meaning to throw away since about 2009, and she gets it down, and she puts the bag in it, and then she stands at the counter and drinks hers and his goes cold and she pours it away at about twenty to five.

She has done this for over a year and she is not confused about anything. She knows perfectly well he is not coming in from the garage. She is not calling out to him and she is not setting a place at Christmas. She is a rational woman who boils a kettle at four o'clock.

She stopped going to the church at about the same time.

Not for any dramatic reason, which is the part that makes it hard to explain. It was a good church. They were kind. But there had been a season of being prayed over, and then a season of being asked how she was doing in a particular tone of voice, and then a season of feeling that the answer she gave was being checked against something.

And one Sunday she just did not go, and nothing happened. Nobody rang. Three weeks later somebody sent a message with three verses in it and she never answered it and that was two winters ago.

So she has the kettle and she has the afternoon, and she does not have a church, and there is a sentence that has started arriving at about half past four when she pours his out.

It is: maybe He went with them.

Maybe God was in that building and she walked out of it and He stayed where the people were, and everything since has been a quiet, ordinary, well-managed life with nothing in it.

If that is a kitchen anybody knows, stay here. That sentence has an answer and it is in the psalms, and it is much older than her church.

The psalms have a word for four in the afternoon

Read this and notice how flat it is. There is no lift in it anywhere.

Therefore is my spirit overwhelmed within me; my heart within me is desolate.Psalm 143:4

Desolate. That is the word for an emptied place. A house with nobody in it. A country after everybody has gone.

That is a description of the inside of a person, put into the songbook, and preserved, and prayed by the church for two thousand years, and there is not one word anywhere near it suggesting the man should be doing better than that.

You are described rather than diagnosed by that verse, and you were never a failure for arriving at desolate. Psalm 143:4 is the written word naming an emptied interior without a syllable of correction, and the Holy Spirit is the one who saw to it that a psalm this flat survived into English.

And here is the mechanism of the whole psalm, which is worth having. He says his spirit is overwhelmed. Then in the very next verse he says he remembers the days of old and meditates on the work of God's hands. He does not stop being overwhelmed in order to do that. The two run at the same time, in the same man, in the same afternoon.

You have not been living a life with nothing in it, and you were never made empty by leaving a room. Psalm 143 holds a desolate heart and a remembering mind in the same breath, and the Spirit who inspired it is at work in a woman standing at a counter at four o'clock.

The kettle is not a symptom

Now let me deal with the kettle, because there is a version of this where somebody makes her ashamed of it, and I am not going to be that person.

Two mugs is not denial. She knows exactly where he is not. That is the whole reason there is a second mug going cold on the counter instead of a man drinking it.

What the kettle is, is a shape. Forty years of afternoons had a shape and the shape does not stop existing because one of the two people in it does. And a human being who keeps the shape is doing something old and deeply sane, and Scripture is full of it.

Israel kept a jar of manna in a box for centuries. They put twelve stones in a river crossing so children would ask about them. There is an entire calendar in the Old Testament built out of keeping the shape of things that had already happened.

The Bible has no problem whatsoever with a ritual that holds a memory. That instinct is the same instinct that built half the worship in that book.

So boil it. Get the green mug down. And when the day comes that you do not, let that be allowed too, and do not schedule it.

You are not doing anything unhealthy at four o'clock, and you were never obliged to dismantle a habit to prove you are well. The written word is full of kept shapes and remembered things, and the Holy Spirit is at work over a mug going cold as much as anywhere in that house.

He did not stay in the building

Now the sentence that arrives at half past four, because it is the one that actually matters and it is wrong.

Here is the thing about the God of the Bible: He is almost never found where the institution is, at exactly the moments when it counts most.

He is in a desert with a runaway. He is at a well at noon with a woman nobody in her town wanted to walk with. He is in a prison at midnight. He is on a road to Emmaus with two people walking away from Jerusalem in a state of complete disappointment, and He falls in step with them, and He walks in the direction they are already going.

That last one is worth sitting with. They were leaving. That is the whole situation. And He did not wait at the city gate for them to come back; He caught up with them on the road out.

And then there is the woman at the well again, because she asks Him the exact question. She raises the building question, which mountain, which place, whose worship is the real one. And He tells her that the hour is coming and now is when it will not be about the place at all.

You are walked with in the direction you actually went, and you were never left at a city gate. Luke 24:15 has Him joining two people on the road away from the city, and the Holy Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen at four o'clock for two winters.

Whether you ever go back is not what this page is for and I am not going to steer it. Some do and some do not. What I will not have is a woman standing at a counter believing that God is an institutional attachment who stayed behind with the people who had the roster.