Half a Bucket of Beans

She has been meaning to get right with God for about two years, and the reason she has not is that she keeps waiting for a proper moment.

I know her porch. Everybody's porch out here is more or less the same porch: two chairs that do not match, a rail with the paint gone off the top of it, and a coffee can of something that used to be a plant. She sits out there most evenings in the good months with a bucket between her feet and snaps beans, which is a job your hands do without you.

That is when it comes up. Every time. Somewhere around half a bucket her mind gets round to it, the way it does when the hands are busy and the head is loose, and she thinks: I ought to make that right.

And then she thinks about what making it right would look like, and it gets big.

She pictures a church, empty, on a weekday, because that seems like the correct venue. She pictures kneeling, and she has bad knees. She pictures crying, and she is not much of a crier, and she has begun to worry that not crying would mean it did not take. She pictures a whole evening set aside, no phone, nothing on the stove, and she cannot think of an evening this month that has nothing on the stove.

So she finishes the beans. And she carries the bucket in. And she means to do it properly, soon, when there is time to do it right.

Two years of that.

Meanwhile the porch is right there. The light is going gold across the field the way it does. The beans are half done. Her hands know the work well enough that she could say anything out loud without missing a single one.

There is nothing wrong with her heart. Her heart has been ready for two years. What she has got wrong is the size of the container she thinks this needs.

That is you, waiting on the proper moment.

You've decided this needs an occasion. A quiet room, a set-aside evening, a feeling that arrives with enough weight that you would know it counted. And a turn done on a porch, mid task, in a work shirt, with beans in your lap, seems too small a thing to hold something you have carried for two years.

He never once asked for a ceremony

Ezekiel is at the end of a long chapter about a matter people had got badly wrong. Then God says this, and it is about as plain as anything in the book.

For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord GOD: wherefore turn yourselves, and live ye.Ezekiel 18:32

Turn yourselves, and live. That is the whole instruction. Two verbs. No location named, no posture named, no hour of the day named, and no weather required inside a person before it takes.

You are able to turn right there in that chair, and it counts the same as it would in any building anywhere, and I am not making the standard easy on you: Ezekiel 18:32 gives the whole instruction in two words, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than the ceremony who makes a thing like this live.

Now I want to say something about the crying, because I have watched this stop good people for years. Somewhere we got the idea that the size of the feeling proves the size of the turn. It does not, and Scripture never once says it does. Feelings are weather. Some people cry at an advertisement and some people did not cry at their own mother's funeral and loved her more than anybody in the room. God is not reading the weather. He is watching which way a person is facing.

And look at the first half of that verse, because that is where the tone of this whole thing sits. I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth. That is God saying He takes no satisfaction in the hard outcome. He is not standing at a distance waiting to be satisfied by your seriousness. He is plainly, openly, on the side of you living.

You have not been kept waiting by God for two years, and the delay was never on His end of it, which is written into the verse rather than being my kind opinion of your situation, with the Spirit of God able to settle it in a person who has been holding out for an occasion.

Here is the plainest way I know to put it. Big things get done in small clothes all the time out here. A marriage gets saved in a truck cab on the way back from the feed store. A grudge that lasted eleven years comes off at a kitchen sink with the water running. A woman decides something enormous while snapping beans, and the beans still get snapped, and supper still happens at six.

That is not the turn being small. That is life being ordinary and God not minding one bit.

This is yours right now, on the porch, in the middle of a job, with the light going gold across the field. Scripture is what settles it and not my say so, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes it off a page and puts it into a plain evening.