The Lid That Was Never On

My grandmother had a pot with a lid that did not fit, and she used it for thirty years anyway.

It was a good pot. The lid was from a different pot, from a set that had otherwise been broken over a long marriage, and it sat about a quarter inch proud on one side. Steam came out of that side continuously. Everybody in the house knew what was in that pot from two rooms away, every single time, and nobody ever remarked on it, because it was simply how that pot worked.

Now I want to tell you about a woman down the road who kept a different kind of lid on for eleven years.

She was as fine a neighbor as you would find. She would take your mail in. She would sit with your mother. And she had one thing she had decided nobody would ever know about, and holding that decision took a very great deal out of her, though you would not have seen it.

Here is what holding a lid actually costs, and I want to be specific, because people talk about this as though it were a feeling and it is not. It is labor. It is deciding, quickly, several times a week, which stories can be told and which cannot. It is knowing which years of your life you cannot refer to and steering round them in an ordinary conversation about the weather. It is being tired in a way that sleep does not touch, because the work is going on all the time in the background, like a fridge.

Eleven years of that.

And the thing about her particular pot, which she could not see and everybody else could, is that the steam had been coming out the side the whole time. Not the details. Nobody knew the details. But the shape of it, the fact of it, the way she went quiet at a certain kind of remark: her sister knew, and the woman who did her hair knew, and God, who never needed the steam, has known since before it happened.

So the labor was going into a job that was not being done. That is the part I want you to have. Not that the lid was wrong to hold, and not that she should have said it to anybody. That the lid was never on.

That is you at the stove.

You've been holding something down for years and it has cost you more than you have ever added up. And the thing you have been holding it down against was never contained by it. The covering has not been protecting you. It has only been costing you.

The proverb is about effort, not about exposure

Solomon puts two ways of living side by side in one line, and people usually read it as a threat. It is not. It is a piece of practical wisdom about where a person's strength goes.

He that covereth his sins shall not prosper: but whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy.Proverbs 28:13

Shall not prosper. In the Hebrew that is about a thing not going well, not succeeding, not advancing. Which is a description of the labor, not a punishment threatened against it. Covering does not work. That is the observation. It is not that God punishes the covering; it is that covering is an occupation with no output, and a person doing it full time is not going to thrive, because all their strength is going into a lid.

You are spending yourself on a job that was never being completed, and that is why the tiredness has never made sense to you, and I am not going soft on anything: Proverbs 28:13 says covering does not prosper, in writing, and it is the Holy Spirit rather than my saying so who can get that under a hand that has held on for eleven years.

Now the second half, and this is where the plain reading matters. Whoso confesseth and forsaketh them shall have mercy. Confess here means to say the thing out in the open. And I want to say clearly, because it has been used badly and I have seen the damage: this is said to God. It does not require you to tell a sister, a husband, a congregation or a group. Nowhere in that verse is a human audience mentioned, and anyone who has added one has added it themselves.

You have never been required to hand this to a person, and the only place it has to go is the place that has already had it for eleven years, which is written into the verse rather than into my read on your situation, with the Spirit of God able to open a hand that argument has not moved.

And look at what is on the other side of it. Mercy. Not a review, not a probation, not a period of being watched. The word is the warm one, the one for kindness that keeps being kind.

Here is the plainest way I know to put it. You are not being asked to take a lid off so that everybody can see. You are being asked to stop spending your life holding down something God has been looking at the whole time, and to receive mercy in the place where the holding was.

This is yours right now, at the stove, with the steam coming out the side the way it has for eleven years, because Scripture sets mercy against covering, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying that into a kitchen where a tired woman is standing.