It Does Not Have To Cost To Be Real

Junie has not sat down at a church meal in nine years.

That is not an exaggeration and everybody in the yard could tell you the same number. Anniversary Sunday, Harvest, the pastor's twentieth, the two funerals and the one wedding: Junie in the kitchen with the door propped open with a folding chair, moving between the warmers, running the pans out, running the empties back, eating standing up at half past four when everybody else had gone home.

She is the reason the food is hot. Nobody disputes this. And every year somebody says Junie, come and sit, and she laughs and says go on, I am fine right here, and she means it, and she is not fine right here.

Because Junie learned something in her mother's house before she was seven years old, and nobody ever went back and untaught it. Love was a thing you proved by how much it took out of you. Anything that came easy was suspect. Anything that did not leave you sore had not really been given.

So this Sunday, two of the younger women planned it like a heist.

One of them got the pans. The other one stood square in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded and would not let her past, and a third put a plate in Junie's hands, a real plate, loaded, and they walked her out into the light and sat her in a chair under the tree where the deacons sit.

And Junie laughed. Loud, the way she does, so that people turned around. And then her face did something complicated, and she looked at the plate in her lap and she genuinely did not know what to do with her hands.

Somebody said, eat, Junie.

And she said, out loud, to nobody: but I have not done anything.

That whole yard went quiet for about a second and a half, and then the music started up again and the moment closed over. But the sentence is still hanging in the air over that chair.

I have not done anything.

And you know exactly what she meant, because you have said it, or you have thought it while you were smiling at somebody.

You have an answer you want to give God. You are not resistant, you are not cold, you are not in rebellion. You want to say yes. But somewhere underneath, you have a rule: if it did not hurt, it did not count. So you keep looking for the version of your yes that costs enough to be believable, and while you look for it, you never actually give the one you have.

Come and sit in the chair. We are going to read what is actually asked.

What the covenant actually asks

Let me start where this site always starts, by refusing to be sentimental with you. Something is asked of you. There is a real ask in this covenant and it is not decorative, and any teacher who tells you nothing at all is required has handed you half a document and called it kindness.

Here it is, in one sentence, and it has been written down for two thousand years.

Do not present your members to sin as instruments for unrighteousness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and your members to God as instruments for righteousness.Romans 6:13

Present. That is the verb, and it is a plain one. Put yourself where He can reach you. Hand over the hands. Stand where a servant stands, close enough to be used.

Now look at what is not in that verse. There is no quantity in it. There is no threshold. There is no minimum weight below which a presented life stops counting. The ask is that you be handed over, not that you be worn down.

So you are asked for something real and you are not asked for your exhaustion, and Romans 6:13 is where that is written rather than a soft thing I decided about you, and the Holy Spirit is at work inside you right now making the handing over possible in the first place.

And here is the ground under all of it, said here in the middle rather than saved for the end. God's side of this is settled: He bound Himself, He swore to it, and it holds. Your side is a response, and it is genuinely asked, and it is not the half holding the covenant up. Both of those sentences are true at once and you are allowed to have both.

Where the extra weight came from

Junie's rule did not come out of Scripture. It came out of a kitchen in a house on a street, from a woman who was probably repeating what somebody taught her.

And I want to be careful here, because a rule like that is not stupidity. It is usually a child being clever. If love in your house went to whoever bled the most, then bleeding was the sensible strategy, and a small girl worked it out and it worked. The trouble is that she carried the strategy out of that house and into a covenant where nobody was grading her that way, and then she could not put it down.

You are not being scolded for carrying it. You were taught it before you could read, and God has never once billed you for a lesson somebody else gave you. What is being handed to you is the actual document, and Romans 6:13 asks for a presented life and says nothing whatsoever about the weight, and His Spirit is the One prying that old rule loose finger by finger.

Look at what God committed Himself to on His own side, in His own words, because this is where the strength for your response comes from and it is not coming out of you.

fear not, for I am with you; be not dismayed, for I am your God; I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my righteous right hand.Isaiah 41:10

Three verbs, all of them His. Strengthen. Help. Uphold. If God has bound Himself to supply the strength for the walk, then a yes that comes easily is not a cheap yes. It is a yes with His hand under it, which is the only kind that has ever held anybody up.

And your yes is allowed to be slow

One more thing, because women like Junie do the opposite of dawdling and women like you sometimes cannot move at all.

There is nothing in these terms that grades the speed of your answer. A response that arrives slowly, after a long time sitting in a chair being confused about your hands, is a response. God has never been in a hurry with a person, and He is not standing over your shoulder timing you.

You have permission to answer small and answer now, because Isaiah 41:10 has God saying He upholds, not that He waits at a distance to see whether you can manage, and the Spirit does not despise a first sentence said badly.