The Kitchen Somebody Else Lives In Now

The tile by the stove was cracked in the shape of a bird, and if you were a child in that house you knew that, because you spent a lot of time on the floor.

That is where he was when it happened, twenty three years old, on the floor beside the stove with his back against the cupboard door that never closed properly. His grandmother was at the table behind him with her rosary of habits and her Bible and her particular way of praying out loud in two languages at once, and she had been at it for maybe an hour, and he had come in to say he was leaving and had somehow ended up on the floor instead.

He does not know what she said. He has never known. He knows that he wept until his shirt was wet and that something enormous went through the room and settled, and that when he got up he was not the man who had walked in.

She died six years ago. The house sold in eleven days. A young couple has it now and they have painted the kitchen a color she would have had opinions about, and they took the stove out entirely.

He drove past last spring and did not stop.

And here is the thing he has said to exactly one person, his brother, in a parking lot, at night, because that is where men say things. He said: "I think it was her. I think it was that room. And now it is gone and I do not know how to get back there."

Which is a grief. It deserves to be called one. But underneath it sits a conclusion, and the conclusion is not true, and it has been quietly running his prayer life for six years.

The conclusion is that God had an address, and the address changed hands.

He was never in the tile

Paul is standing in Athens in front of a city stuffed with shrines, and the whole point of a shrine is that a god is at it. You go there. You do not get the god anywhere else. And Paul stands up in the middle of all that and says something that would have sounded absurd to everybody listening.

That they should seek the Lord, if haply they might feel after him, and find him, though he be not far from every one of us.Acts 17:27

Take that where you sit tonight. You are near enough to be heard without moving house. The word says He is not far from every one of us, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a fact about a kitchen and not a fact about Athens.

Not far. From every one of us. In a city of a thousand addresses, He says the Lord does not keep one.

So hear this where you are sitting, and understand it is not my comfort but His claim: you are within reach right now, as you read this. Not because of anything you have arranged, but because His word says He is not far from every one of us, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes that sentence off a page and lays it down in a man's actual chest.

That is what makes the loss of the kitchen survivable. Your grandmother was not a door. She was a woman who prayed, and the prayers were real, and the God who answered them did not live under her sink.

There was a man in the seventeen hundreds who was undone in a small meeting on a street in London while somebody read aloud from a preface. His heart, he said, was strangely warmed. That sentence is quoted everywhere. What he did next almost never is.

He built a timetable, and then he took it outdoors.

Small groups meeting at a fixed hour, plain questions asked out loud among a few people who actually knew each other. And then years of preaching in fields, in yards, at the mouths of coal mines at five in the morning, in prisons where nobody could pay him back for the visit. The name that got attached to those people was coined as an insult about how methodical they were. They kept it. It was accurate.

He did not put a plaque on the room. He put the fire on a horse.

A warmed heart with no method cools. A method with no warmth is a schedule and nothing else. He held both, and holding both meant refusing to treat one room as the only room.

You are not required to reproduce it. Let that land, because it is the weight you have been carrying past that house every spring. Nowhere is it written that a kitchen floor is the correct posture and a car seat is a lesser one. Scripture says He fills all in all, and His Spirit is the one who makes a man on a floor and a man at a desk equally reachable.

And I am not going to tell you the kitchen did not matter. It mattered. He met a twenty three year old on the floor because that is where the boy was, and He used a woman with a rosary of habits and two languages, and He was not embarrassed about any of it. He is simply not obliged to keep a house in the family in order to keep meeting you.