The Pie I Took Down the Road

There is a way of learning a thing on a road like that. Nobody tells you. You watch it happen and then it is your turn.

A death at the Barlow place, Wednesday morning. Their girl, twenty three, and the how of it is on that road already and will be everywhere by Friday, and it is nobody's business, and it will be discussed anyway.

So she made a pie. That is what you do. She made a chicken pie big enough for four days and she put the dish towel over the top of it and she stood in her own kitchen doorway with it in both hands and looked down the gravel at their mailbox, half a mile off, and she did not move for a while.

Because here is the thing about her kitchen.

It has not been right in two years. That is the only way she can say it, and she has never said it out loud to anybody, because if she tried to explain it she would sound foolish. The kitchen is exactly the same. Nothing in it has moved. The stove is the stove, the light comes in the same window at the same hour, everything is where it has always been.

Frank died in that kitchen. On the floor by the sink. In September, two years ago, on an ordinary Tuesday afternoon while she was out at the line with a basket on her hip.

And she cooks in there every day. She has never once thought about not cooking in there. But something about that room stopped being hers, and she has never found the word for it, and she has never told her daughter, and she is not going to.

So she stands in that doorway with a pie for the Barlows and there is a small voice, and the voice says: you have got no business carrying comfort down that road when you cannot even stand at your own sink some mornings.

And she went anyway. She always goes.

If anybody has stood in a doorway holding a dish like that, stay with me. There are two verses three lines apart in Galatians, and most people have only ever read one of them, and the two together settle this.

Two words, two loads, three verses apart

Here is the first one, and it is the one everybody knows.

Bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ.Galatians 6:2

And here is the second one, and it sits three verses down, and read together they look like a contradiction until you look at the words underneath them.

For every man shall bear his own burden.Galatians 6:5

Paul is not confused and he is not correcting himself. He uses two different words.

The one in verse two is a heavy thing. A crushing load. The kind of weight that has to be shared or the person under it goes down.

The one in verse five is a different word entirely. It is the word for a soldier's pack, or a ship's cargo. A thing a person carries as a matter of course, all day, that belongs to them.

So the instruction is not that a person must be empty handed before she can help carry anything. Every single one of them has a pack. That is assumed. That is verse five. And then, on top of that, in verse two, the church is told to get underneath the crushing loads together.

Nobody in that chapter puts anything down first.

You are carrying your own pack down that road exactly as Paul assumed you would be, and you were carrying it in every one of the two Septembers behind you. Galatians 6:5 is the written word saying every man shall bear his own burden three lines after telling the church to bear one another's, and the Spirit who breathed both of them is standing in a kitchen doorway with a woman holding a pie.

And look at what verse two calls it. So fulfill the law of Christ. That is what He asks of the whole church, and He asks it of people who are all, every one of them, walking around with their own packs on.

You are fulfilling the law of Christ on a gravel track this afternoon, and you were fulfilling it every time you went down that road in the last two years. Galatians 6:2 says bearing one another's burdens is the law of Christ and never once makes it the work of the unburdened, and the Holy Spirit is not standing at the Barlows' gate asking whether a woman has settled her own house first.

Nothing about that kitchen is a disqualification

Now let me deal with the voice in the doorway, because it has an argument and the argument is not sound.

It says a woman who cannot stand at her own sink some mornings has no business carrying comfort anywhere.

Ask it the plain question. Who exactly does it want sent to the Barlows this afternoon?

Somebody whose kitchen is fine. Somebody who has never had a Tuesday afternoon go wrong. Somebody who can walk into that house on the worst Wednesday of their lives and be, in every way, unmarked.

That person would be the least useful visitor on that road.

The woman with the pie is going to walk into that house and she is going to know, without being told, that nobody has eaten and nobody will, and that the mother will want to be busy and will not know what to be busy with, and that there is a chair somewhere in that house that nobody is going to sit in, and she is going to know exactly what to do with all of that, and not one bit of it came out of a book.

That knowledge cost her a kitchen. But it is real, and it is hers, and it is worth carrying down a road.

You are able to walk into that house because of a September you never asked for, and you were made able by the very thing you have been calling a disqualification. 2 Corinthians 1:4 says the comfort a person receives in trouble is what gets handed on into any trouble, and the Spirit of God has never wasted a single thing anybody has been through.

The road is meant to run both ways and it has not

Now here is the part I want to say most, and it is not about the Barlows at all.

She has carried food to every house on that road for forty years. She carried it when the Wallaces lost their boy. She carried it twice to the trailer at the bend. She carried a ham to a family she did not like and never mentioned it to anybody.

And in the two years since September, this is the question worth sitting with: what came up her own track?

Some things came. A great deal came in the first two weeks, and then it did what it does, and by November it had stopped, and since then she has been the one who carries.

That is not a complaint against anybody on that road. They are not bad people. It is just what happens to the woman who is always the one with the dish, because after a while nobody can picture her needing anything.

But verse two is not a job description for her. It is a command given to everybody, and she is inside the everybody, and she has been quietly filed outside it by a whole road, herself included.

You are inside the sentence that says bear one another's burdens and not only on the giving end of it, and you were inside it in every week since September when nothing came up your track. Galatians 6:2 is a command laid on the whole church with no one exempted and no one excluded, and the Holy Spirit has never once agreed that a strong woman is a woman who does not need carrying.