The Last House On The Street

There are nine houses on Ruthie Souza's street, and the last one is gray with a wide concrete ramp where the front steps used to be.

Six people live there. There is a van in the driveway with a lift on the side and a basketball hoop over the garage that somebody lowered a long time ago and never put back.

Ruthie has lived four doors up for nine years and she has never once been inside that house.

She has reasons and they are all decent ones. She is not trained for anything like that, and she is fairly sure she would say the wrong thing. She is fifty two, she does the books for a landscaping outfit, she is tired at the end of the day, and she is not a people person like her sister, who could talk to a fence post and have it laughing.

And under all of that is the real one, and she has never said it out loud, not once, not even in the car.

She has nothing to bring.

Twice she has gotten as far as their mailbox. Both times she turned around at the end of the driveway, walked home, and was in a foul mood with herself all evening.

Here is what she does every Sunday, and has done since her mother taught her at nineteen.

She makes bread. One loaf, the same loaf, the same chipped blue bowl, the same forty minutes with the radio on, out of the oven at about ten, and the whole house smells like it until Tuesday.

And there are two of them in that house.

So every week they get through about half, and by Wednesday the rest is a brick, and every Wednesday for nine years she has stood at the bin with the other half of her own bread in her hand and dropped it in.

Then one Sunday in September she stood there at half past ten with the loaf just cool enough to handle and the bin lid up, and she stopped.

She did not decide anything. She did not have a moment, she did not pray about it. She stood there holding half a loaf with her arm out over an open trash can, and something in her would not let go of it.

So she wrapped it in a dish towel, because it was still a little warm, and went out the front door in her house slippers, which she has never lived down.

Four doors. Ninety seconds. She got to the mailbox and her feet kept going, and she knocked on the screen door, and a young man in his twenties opened it and stood there looking at her.

And she said, "I have too much bread."

And he said, "Okay." And then he turned his head and shouted back into the house, "There's bread!"

And three people came to that door at once. One wanted to know what kind. One wanted to know whether she was the lady with the blue car, and told her his sister has a blue car, and what year it is. The young man is called Kai, and he took the towel off the loaf and looked at it a long moment and said it was still warm, in the tone of a man reporting something serious.

Ruthie stood on that step for twenty minutes. She did not go in, not that day, and nobody asked her to. She went home and sat in her own kitchen and did not turn the radio on.

She went back the next Sunday.

What hast thou in the house

There is a woman in Second Kings who comes to the prophet at the end of everything, with nothing left and no ideas left, and she says so. And Elisha does not ask what she needs. Read the question he actually asks her.

And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for thee? tell me, what hast thou in the house? And she said, Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil.2 Kings 4:2

What hast thou in the house.

Not what training have you had. Not who sent you. Not are you the kind of person who does this. What is already there, in the building you are standing in.

And now look at her answer, because it is the answer every one of us gives.

Nothing.

Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house. That is the whole sentence she meant to say, flat, the way a person says it when they have been through the cupboards a hundred times in their head. And then, in the same breath, she corrects herself.

Save a pot of oil.

That word save is where this entire message lives. She had discounted it before it left her mouth. It was so ordinary, so daily, so obviously not enough, that she had not counted it as anything, and God had to get it out of her sideways, as an afterthought, attached to the word nothing.

And that is exactly where yours is. You are not empty, you have been miscounting, and the thing you throw out on Wednesdays is on the inventory. I am not being poetic. Scripture has the woman name it herself, in the same sentence as the word nothing, and it is the Holy Spirit who does that work in a person: He does not put something new in the house, He gets you to say out loud what is already on the counter.

And notice where the whole thing happens.

Elisha does not move her anywhere. He does not send her to a city, or to a school, or to somebody more qualified. It all happens inside her own house, with her own pot, with her own sons, with the door shut.

The sending starts where you are standing, and it always has. The written word puts the miracle inside a woman's own four walls, and the Spirit of God has never needed a person to relocate before He could use them. He needs the door opened, and the door in question is usually the one you already own.

Now the careful thing about your reasons, because I do not intend to take them off you dishonestly. Every one of them is real. You are not trained. You might say the wrong thing, and the world does not end. You are tired, the tiredness is not imaginary, and nothing here asks you to add a shift to a full life.

But none of those reasons was ever the question. God has never once opened with what you do not have. It is written that He hath chosen the weak things of the world, and the base things, and the things which are despised, and He has not amended that list since. And the Holy Spirit, who is called the Comforter, is not standing at the end of your street with a clipboard grading your approach.

Now let me stop saying she, because the woman at the bin with her arm out is you.

You know the house, and how many doors, and how long you have been driving past it. You know the two times you nearly went. And you know the thing underneath all the decent reasons, the one you have never said in the car, which is that you have nothing worth bringing and everybody there is already looked after by people who know what they are doing.

What is in your hands is enough to be sent with. Not almost, not once you have more of it, enough. That is not my opinion of your bread. It is the pattern God set in His own word, where He starts with what a person already has and never with what they lack, and the Spirit who apportions is the One who put the thing in your kitchen.