The Short List On The Kitchen Door

There is a piece of card on the back of Reva's kitchen door and it has eleven words on it and it has been there since the March her mother died.

Before the card there was a folder.

The folder is still in the dresser and Reva can tell you exactly what is in it, because she assembled it over about nine years and it is, in its way, an impressive piece of work.

It has four printed articles that disagree with each other. It has notes from two different talks by two men who were both certain and who could not both be right. It has a page in her own handwriting where she tried to set the positions side by side in two columns, which she gave up on halfway down because the columns kept needing footnotes.

And it has, at the back, a list she made when she was about forty of everything she had ever been told God requires, which runs to thirty-one items and includes several that contradict each other outright.

She could not start.

That is the whole of it. Nine years of not being able to begin anything, because beginning would mean choosing a list, and choosing a list would mean deciding which of several people she loved and respected was wrong.

Her mother, who was not a reader and not a talker and who never once in her life expressed a position on any of this, died in the March.

And Reva was in that kitchen afterwards doing the thing you do, which is standing in a room and not knowing what to do with your hands, and she found a piece of card and she wrote eleven words on it and put it on the back of the door with a drawing pin.

It has been there four years. She says she has never taken it down and she has never added to it, and that adding to it was the temptation for about the first eight months.

You may have a folder. It may not be paper. It may be nine years of talks and articles and people who were certain, and a private inability to begin anything at all because beginning would mean deciding who was wrong. And nobody has ever handed you a short list.

The Prophet Answers A Question About Offerings With Three Plain Things

There is a passage in Micah where somebody asks, in escalating and slightly panicky terms, what God actually wants brought to Him. The question goes up and up.

And then the answer comes back, and it is famously short.

"He hath shewed thee, O man, what is good; and what doth the LORD require of thee, but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God?"Micah 6:8

Three things. Do justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly.

Notice what the answer does with the question. The question was about what to bring and how much of it. The answer does not engage with the amount at all. It does not say more, and it does not say less, and it does not adjudicate. It moves the whole thing onto ground where a person can start this afternoon.

You have been handed something short enough to begin. Micah 6 answers a question about offerings with three plain things and never once returns to the arithmetic, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that and pins it to the back of a kitchen door.

And notice the first four words. He hath shewed thee. Past tense. The showing has already happened. Whatever else is unresolved in your folder, the thing Micah puts in front of a person is described as already given rather than still being worked out.

You were shown this rather than left to determine it. That is what the written word says when it is asked the biggest version of this question, and it is the Spirit of God who makes three plain things land in somebody who has thirty-one on a list in a dresser.

This Page Has No List Of Its Own

Now be exact, because a page about competing lists that quietly adds a thirty-second item would be a cruel thing to write.

Nothing here asks anything of you. No figure, no proportion, no percentage, no practice, no sign-up sheet, no membership, no daily anything, and nothing routed to any person, cause, church or work anywhere at all, this one included.

And this site does not settle the argument in your folder. It does not lean toward either of those two certain men. It does not tell you which column was right. It has no view, it is not withholding one, and the absence is not a hint.

That is deliberate. The people in your folder are engaging with a real question and there are places where it is engaged with properly, and this is a place for somebody who wants to honor God today and cannot get started.

You can begin today with every one of those pages still unreconciled. It is written that He has shown you what is good, and the showing does not wait on the resolving, and His Spirit is the one who has been in that kitchen through all nine years of the folder.

And you are as fully His with thirty-one items unresolved as you would be with all of them settled, that is the written shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one keeping this page from becoming another sheet for the dresser.