The Jar She Stopped Filling

The jar is on the high shelf in the pantry and there is about four years of nothing in it.

It used to have coins going in every week. Not much and not on any system. Whatever was in her coat pocket on a Friday, and sometimes a note if it had been a good month, and she never counted it and she never once opened it in eleven years.

It was for a thing she was sure was coming.

She would not want the thing described and it does not matter for this. It was specific, and she believed it, and she had good reasons, and she told nobody except the two people who needed to know because it would have involved them.

Then a stretch happened where it became fairly clear that it was not coming in the way she had understood, and she did not have a crisis about it, and she did not stop believing in God, and she did not tell anybody.

She simply stopped putting the coins in.

There was no last Friday that she noticed. She just found, sometime the following spring, that she had not done it in a while, and that she had a small feeling of relief about that which she did not want to look at directly.

Because here is the true thing, and it took her about two more years to be able to say it to herself in the kitchen.

She did not stop because she decided it was over.

She stopped because the sight of that jar filling up had begun to hurt more than the thing not arriving did.

If there is a jar on a high shelf in your house, come and sit down at this table. Nobody is going to hand you a date.

Paul puts hoping and not seeing in the same sentence

There is a line in Romans that does something people do not expect, which is that it admits the whole problem out loud.

But if we hope for that we see not, then do we with patience wait for it.Romans 8:25

Read the front half again. If we hope for what we do not see.

Paul does not treat the not seeing as a problem to be solved. He does not say hope harder until you can see it, and he does not say a stronger believer would be able to make it out from here. He takes the not seeing as the ordinary condition of hoping at all, and builds the rest of the sentence on top of it.

Which means the thing you have been quietly ashamed of, that you could not keep seeing it, is not a fault. It is the description.

You are not hoping badly by being unable to see it, and Scripture starts from exactly that position. Romans 8:25 makes the not seeing the premise rather than the failure, and it is the Holy Spirit who is named two verses on as helping the very weakness that hoping produces, which means the state you have been hiding is the state the passage is written for.

Wanting it back without going back to the jar

Now let me be careful, because I am not handing you back the arrangement that hurt you.

Nobody is asking you to start filling that jar again. That is not the assignment and it may never be. A weekly act of putting money by for a specific expected thing is a weekly examination, and eleven years of a weekly examination is a great deal for anybody to carry, and you were not weak for putting it down. Isaiah 42:3 says a bruised reed shall he not break, and the Holy Spirit carries a word at the weight a person can take, so setting that jar down was not a fall and has never been read as one.

The hope in this passage is a different shape. The word Paul uses for waiting is a carrying word, not a watching one. It describes somebody staying under a weight, not somebody checking a shelf.

And there is no date in it anywhere. No season, nothing to work out, nothing to be right or wrong about. This tradition learned that expensively and this site will not sell it back to you.

You are allowed to want it again, and wanting it does not commit you to a Friday. Titus 2:13 calls it that blessed hope and fastens it to the appearing of Christ Himself rather than to any arrangement of yours, and it is His Spirit who is called the guarantee of what is coming in Ephesians 1:14, which means what is being handed back is a Person rather than a jar.

And here is the thing you never said, so I will say it. It hurt. The filling hurt more than the not arriving, and that is a real and understandable thing about a human being, and God did not think less of you for taking the jar down.

You were carried through all of that, including the years you kept filling it and the spring you stopped. Isaiah 46:4 says I have made and I will bear, and it is His Spirit who does the bearing, which means the woman who could not stand the sight of a jar was being held the entire time she thought she was simply going quiet.