The Seed He Kept In The Freezer

Talmadge Hurley had a pint jar of his grandmother's cornfield beans in the bottom of a chest freezer on his back porch, and he had not opened it in nine years.

They were a speckled brown bean, a little flatter than a pinto, and nobody sold them anywhere. His grandmother had grown them up the corn every year of her life, and her mother before her, and the story in that family was that they came over the mountain in somebody's apron pocket a long way back. When she died, the jar came to Tal, because Tal was the one who gardened.

He put it in the freezer. That is what you do with seed you want to keep.

The first spring he thought about it and did not. The second spring he got the jar out, set it on the kitchen table, looked at it for a while and put it back.

Because here is the arithmetic he was doing, and he never said it out loud to a living soul. There was one jar. If he planted it and the deer came through, or the ground stayed wet, or the beetles got in it, that was the end of a hundred and some years, and it would have ended on his watch, in his garden, because of a decision he personally made.

So the safest place for a hundred years of beans was a freezer, where nothing could happen to them.

Nothing was exactly what happened to them.

Then the Bowlings moved into the old Sizemore place, and their girl was maybe eleven, and she got it into her head to make a garden. She came up the road and stood at the end of Tal's rows asking questions for the better part of an hour, the way an eleven year old does, and she wanted to know what everything was.

That night Tal got the jar out of the freezer and sat with it at the kitchen table again.

And in the morning he counted out about a hundred and forty seed into an envelope and walked them down the road, and he told her they went in when the corn was knee high and they would climb anything you gave them.

Then he went home and planted the rest of them himself. All of them. He kept back nothing, because once you have given part of a thing away, keeping the other part in a freezer stops making any sense at all.

That September there were more beans on that one row than Tal and the Bowlings put together could eat, and they gave sacks of them up and down that road, and he filled the jar back to the lid out of what was left over and had beans on top of that.

And there is a piece of it he did not expect. He walked down there in August to look at hers, and hers were up the pole and loaded, and the girl had already given a mess of them to her aunt in Ohio.

His grandmother's beans were in Ohio, and Tal had not gone anywhere.

What are they among so many

There is a line in John 6 that gets read past because it sounds like a footnote, and it is actually the whole ache of this thing.

There is a lad here, which hath five barley loaves, and two small fishes: but what are they among so many?John 6:9

That is Andrew, doing the arithmetic. He has found the only food on the hillside and he cannot make it come out. Five loaves against five thousand men. What are they among so many.

You have done that arithmetic. Every one of us has. One kitchen, one road, one recipe card, one small ordinary life, held up against everything God is apparently doing somewhere else with people who have more to offer.

And you are not wrong about the size of what you are holding. You are wrong about what size it needs to be. I am not softening the math for you. The written word puts Andrew's objection right there in the text and never corrects it, and the Holy Spirit left it standing on purpose, because the smallness was never the problem.

Jesus does not answer him. Not one word about the arithmetic. He says make the men sit down.

Now watch the boy, because he is the one you need.

He is not named. He is not called. He does not get a sending, a title, a commission or a mention afterward. Nobody tells him he has a gift. He hands over what was already in his hands, and then he sits down on the grass with everybody else, and he eats supper with five thousand people.

You are not being asked to go anywhere. You are being asked what is already in your hands. Scripture keeps that boy on the hillside from beginning to end, and the Spirit who has been stirring you lately is not stirring you toward somebody else's life.

Now let me say the true thing about that card, because it has never been laziness and I will not have you calling it that.

It is the last of her handwriting that is also a working thing. Everything else she wrote is a keepsake now, and this one still does a job. And there is a quieter piece under that one, the piece you would not say out loud. As long as you are the only one who has it, you are still the one who holds her.

Copying it out feels like admitting it is only information.

Hear me, because this is the turn. The card was never your inheritance. The cooking was, and it is already yours, and it has been since you were tall enough to see the counter. The word says the boy had the loaves in his hands before anybody asked him for them, and the Spirit is not asking you to produce something you have not been given.

And a copy does not divide her. Nothing about this is division. A recipe in a second kitchen is not half a recipe, and a hundred and forty beans out of a jar did not make the jar worth less. What you are holding does not shrink when it is handed on, and it has never once been the kind of thing that could.

That is what the boy found out on the grass, and it is why the fragments filled twelve baskets and everybody went home fed. Scripture has the leftovers exceeding the lunch, and the Spirit who worked that is the same Spirit in your ordinary kitchen tonight.

The sending starts where you are standing, and it started before you noticed. The written word never sends that boy one step off that hillside, and God is not waiting on you to become somebody with more to offer before He uses what He already put in your hands.