The Kitchen Got Warm Anyway

Delia Rhodes kept a page in the back of a spiral notebook and never showed it to a living soul.

It had two columns. On the left she wrote the date. On the right, in her small careful hand, she wrote what had happened and what it might have proved.

March, her uncle's funeral: cried the whole way through the second verse of the old hymn. Might be grief. Might be God. Could not tell.

November, the week her boy could not get a full breath: prayed beside his bed until the fever turned at four in the morning. Might be faith. Might be a mother. Could not tell.

Eleven years of that page, and not one entry marked settled.

She was raised on a gravel road where the church was the second building you came to. She could sing every verse of everything without opening the book. She loved the people who taught it to her and was not ashamed of a minute of it. She simply could not tell you whether an ounce of it belonged to her.

Her mother's faith had been the real article. You could see it on the woman. It got up at five and never once complained about the getting up. Delia had watched it work for forty years, and when she looked inside herself for the same thing she could not find it, and she looked constantly, which was the actual trouble, though nobody told her that.

Her mother died in October. Delia moved up to the house on the ridge.

The wood stove in that kitchen had not been out cold in forty years. Banked every night, stirred every dawn, and the getting up at five was mostly that. Delia kept it going through November and most of December. Then one morning she came down the stairs in her coat, put her hand flat on the iron, and there was nothing in it. Cold all the way through. She had let it die in her sleep.

She cleaned it out. She laid the kindling wrong and it smoked and quit on her. She laid it wrong again. On the third try she got the draft open before she struck the match, the way she had watched her mother do it ten thousand times without once doing it herself, and it took, and it climbed, and it began to roar.

She sat down on the floor in front of the open door with her coat still buttoned and watched her own fire burn in her mother's stove.

And she said it out loud to the empty kitchen, without deciding to:

"I believe He is exactly who He says He is. And I believe He has me."

Nobody heard her. There was not another person in the house. She never wrote it on the page in the back of the notebook, because for the first time in eleven years she was not gathering evidence.

The kitchen got warm anyway.

The faith that dwelt first

Paul writes one sentence to a young man he loves, and in it he does something most of us have never managed for ourselves.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also.2 Timothy 1:5

Read the order of it. Lois first. Then Eunice. Then Timothy, at the end of the row.

Paul is not embarrassed about the row. He names the women out loud, and he does not treat being handed something as a mark against the one who received it. Nothing here asks Timothy to be sorry he was raised in it.

But look hard at the word Paul chose. He does not say the faith was Lois's and Timothy is borrowing it. He says it dwelt first in Lois. Dwelt. It lived there. It kept house there. It was hers in her own body, at her own table. And then Paul says the very same thing over the young man: in thee also. Not a photograph of hers. The same living thing, keeping house in a second home, under its own roof.

The faith in you is not on loan from the people who taught it to you. It is dwelling, and it is dwelling in you. That is not my kind opinion laid over your life. Paul wrote in thee also, and the One who does the dwelling is the Holy Spirit Himself, who has never yet moved into a house and left a picture of Himself in the spare room instead.

Now the part that quietly takes the pen out of your hand. I am persuaded. Paul was persuaded. Scripture nowhere records that Timothy was. Somebody else was sure of that young man's faith before he was sure of it himself, and Paul does not scold him for the gap or set him a test to sit. He simply tells him what is already so. Two verses later he tells him to stir up the gift of God that is in him, and you do not stir what is not there.

The certainty was never yours to manufacture. It is handed to you, and the hand is His, and it is open right now. The written word calls the faith in Timothy unfeigned, which means it was the genuine article and not a performance, and the Spirit who searched that young man and found it real is the same Spirit dwelling in you. He is not grading you. He is testifying.

Here is what an auditor learns late, and I say it as one. There is a whole class of true things that will not survive being checked, and not because they are false. Checking is simply the wrong instrument.

A ledger can tell you what a fire cost. It cannot tell you whether you are warm. You can weigh the wood, date the match, price the stovepipe to the penny, and at the end of that arithmetic you still have to stop counting and put your hands out. Assurance does not come up out of a column. It comes from Someone, and Romans 8:16 puts it in writing: the Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God.

And hear this plainly. You were not being faithless when you kept that page. You were being honest, and honest is a better place to start from than a confidence borrowed off somebody else's face. The trouble was only ever the instrument, and nobody handed you a better one.

So take this one instead.

You are not on trial in your own kitchen. The verdict came in at the cross, and you have been re-trying a case God already closed. I am not clever enough to have thought that up. Scripture says there is now no condemnation to them which are in Christ Jesus, and the Spirit is the one who makes that word live in the room where you are sitting, at the hour you are sitting there.

And now let me say the rest of it to you and not about her, because the woman on that kitchen floor is you.

You know the page. You know the two columns. You know exactly how it feels to sing every word of a hymn while a quiet voice underneath asks whether any of this is yours or whether you are simply very good at your mother's habits.

That question has no authority over you. It never did. The word that stands over you says the same Spirit dwells in you as dwelt in Lois and Eunice, and He is not a rumor passed down a row of chairs. He is a Person, and He is in your house.