The Last Loaf on the Shelf

There is one loaf left on the bread shelf and somebody has sat on it.

Not badly. One corner has gone in, the way a corner goes when a bag has been put down on it and then picked up again, and the plastic has that slightly loose look. Everything else on the shelf has gone. There are cage carts down the middle of the aisle with tomorrow's stock still shrink wrapped on them, and two members of staff working along the shelves turning tins to face the front, and a man three aisles over having a conversation with somebody on speakerphone about a boiler.

She does the shop at this hour because it is the only hour that exists. Her mother goes down at half eight and the carer who comes in on a Wednesday cannot do evenings, and so the week's food happens now, in a nearly empty supermarket, while somebody polishes the floor at the far end.

She picks up the loaf. Looks at the crushed corner. Puts it in the cart, because it is the loaf there is.

And then she stands there for a second longer than a person normally stands in front of an empty bread shelf, because a sentence has arrived and she cannot get round it.

That is what I bring Him.

Not the morning, not the good hours, not the version of her that is patient and quick and kind, because those went somewhere around four o'clock. What He gets is the thing left at the end, with the corner in. And she has been handing that over for two years and telling herself it does not matter, and tonight, in aisle six, it matters.

You have your own aisle six. It might be a hallway with a coat still on. It might be the four minutes after somebody finally goes to sleep. And the arithmetic in it is always the same: God is being very patient with the small end of me.

He knows exactly what He is looking at

Start here, because the rest of it stands on this one line.

As a father shows compassion to his children, so the Lord shows compassion to those who fear Him. For He knows our frame; He remembers that we are dust.Psalm 103:13-14

He knows our frame. That is a builder's word: the structure of the thing, what it is made of, what load it will take before it starts to give. God is not across a desk from you wondering why the output is down this quarter. He drew the frame. He knows what a Tuesday in your house takes out of it.

You are known all the way down, and there is nothing about tonight that God is having to be talked round to. That is not my kindness dressed up as doctrine. The written word says He remembers we are dust, so the frailty is not new information reaching Him late, and His Spirit is the one who turns that from a fact into a rest. He is not surprised by what arrived. There was no other version He was expecting instead.

Nobody is weighing the basket

There is an old picture here that will take some weight off, and it is worth having in full.

A farmer would come with a basket. Not with the harvest, not with the best of it arranged for inspection. A basket, the first of what the ground had done, carried in his own hands, and he would set it down, and then he would say something over it. And what he said had nothing to do with the contents. It was the whole story of how he came to be standing there: my father was a wandering Aramean, we went down, we cried out, He heard us, He brought us out, and this ground and everything that came out of it came from His hand.

The words were the point. The basket was simply how a person arrives holding something while they say them.

You have somewhere to set down what is left of you, and the setting down is the whole of what is being asked. Scripture keeps the acknowledgment and the amount in completely separate places, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries a sentence from aisle six to the throne of God without a single thing being lost on the way. There is no scale anywhere in that picture. Nobody stands at the end of the table with a set of weights.

Which means the crushed corner is not a defect in the offering. It is a fact about the day, and God has been watching the day.

Two things a worn out person has to hear

The first is that God still meets people in the ordinary hours. Not met, historically, in the more dramatic stories. Meets. In hallways, at sinks, at the end of an aisle while somebody polishes a floor.

The second is that He does it with this one. You. Not with the rested believer who has a quiet hour and a comfortable chair and a plan for it.

You have His full attention at the end of a day like this one, and it is not a smaller portion of Him than anybody else receives. The written word says He is near to all who call on Him, with no clause anywhere about their condition, and the Holy Spirit is the one closing that distance rather than the quality of the words you can currently assemble. He does not turn up in fractions.

And the mountain here is not the tiredness. It is the arithmetic. Jesus did not ask for a strong heart when He spoke about a mountain going; He asked for a mouth. Speak to it, He said, and He said it to men who had just failed at something in public. So the thing to speak to tonight is the sum you keep quietly running about yourself.