Forty Plates And A Locked Kitchen

They are heavy, is the thing nobody tells you about plates. Forty of them in four stacks of ten in a blue plastic crate, and she has moved that crate from the hall to her car to her hallway to under the stairs and back out again twice.

Nobody wants them. She has offered them to three churches, a scout group, and a woman who runs a thing for new mothers, and every single one of them already has plates.

The kitchen failed its inspection in April. That is the whole of the story. A hall kitchen with a ventilation problem and a sink in the wrong place and a floor covering that has not been legal since before she was born. It is not fixable for less than a number nobody in that building has, and the letter said what letters say, and a man in a car came and photographed the floor.

Six years of Saturdays. Between thirty and forty people every week, and more in December, and a system she was rather proud of involving three slow cookers and a timing sheet.

She has not been back into the building since June.

The sentence arrives most often when she moves the crate, which is why she has stopped moving it. It is not I miss cooking. It is: feeding people was what I did for God, and I cannot do it, so what am I now.

You know that sentence. It might be plates, or a van, or a pair of hands that used to work. There was a thing you did, and doing it was how you knew you were serving God, and it has been taken away by something with a form and a letter and a photograph of a floor.

Somebody asked Him what the work was

A crowd once put your exact question to Jesus. Not a version of it. The same one, in almost the same words: what shall we do, that we might work the works of God.

They had been fed the day before, by the way. Five thousand of them. Bread in their hands, the whole thing, and the next morning they came back asking what they should be doing.

This is the work of God, that ye believe on him whom he hath sent.John 6:29

He gives them one work. Singular. Not a list, not a rota, not a set of Saturdays. Believe on the One He sent. That is the work of God, named by Him, in answer to precisely the question you have been asking a blue crate under your stairs.

You are doing the work of God this morning, in a hallway with forty plates nobody wants, and you have not stopped doing it for one day since April. That is what the written word says over you and not a soft thing I have chosen to say to a woman who lost her kitchen, and the Holy Spirit who has been in you through the whole six years and the whole of this year is the evidence that the work was never the meal.

Watch what that does to the arithmetic you run every time you move that crate. If the work is what He named, then a failed inspection is information about ventilation, a sink and a floor. It is not information about your service to God, and it never had the standing to become that.

The plates were the fruit, not the root

Here is the second thing, and it takes the weight off.

Six years of Saturdays did not make you a servant of God. They came out of one. That is the right way round and it matters enormously, because if the cooking made you a servant then losing the kitchen unmakes you, and you have been quietly living under that arithmetic since June.

You have been carried through every week since the letter came, and the carrying was never wages for a hot meal on a Saturday. Scripture says He works all things after the counsel of His own will, and it is the Holy Spirit doing that work in you rather than checking whether a hall has a compliant floor.

There is something worth saying plainly, because this is exactly where a message like this could turn into a push and it will not. Nothing here is telling you to find another kitchen. Nothing is telling you to fundraise for the ventilation or to start something smaller at home. If those forty plates go to a charity shop next week and you never cook for a crowd again you have not stepped one inch outside the work of God, because the work He named was never a menu.

This is where your mouth comes in, because I am not leaving you with a warm thought under the stairs. Jesus taught that the smallest living faith a person has, spoken out loud at the thing in the way, is enough for God to work with. Out loud. Not carried around a hallway in a crate. And the thing in the way is not the inspector, who was doing his job properly, and it is not the floor. It is a sentence: I cannot do it, so what am I now. Nobody has ever answered that out loud, and you least of all.

You have real authority to answer it, and it is yours because you are in Christ, not because you feel like a woman with authority holding a stack of plates. Scripture hands you the standing and the Holy Spirit carries the words, and the power was never in how much conviction you could find on a Tuesday.

If this has taken you somewhere darker than loss, and there are hours when you would rather not be here at all, tell a living person today. Your doctor, or a crisis line, 988 in the United States, 116 123 in the United Kingdom, or the emergency number where you live. That is not a detour from what God is doing with your life. Very often it is exactly what He is doing, arriving down a telephone.