The Share She Never Took

Iva has never sat down at her own table.

Not once, not in fifty years, not the way the rest of them sit down. She serves. She gets the plates going around and the biscuits passed and somebody's tea filled, and then she goes back to the stove and stands at the counter with a fork and eats whatever is left in the pans, mostly cold, usually standing up, usually while somebody hollers a question at her from the other room.

If you said something about it she would wave you off. She likes it that way, she says, and there is truth in that. She does like it. Standing at that counter with a fork is where she has been happiest for half a century, and a person who tells her she has been oppressed by a casserole dish has misunderstood the woman entirely.

But something happened this last Sunday.

Her grandson, who is twenty-four and about as subtle as a truck, came in early and got the plates going himself. And when it was time to sit, he set a full plate down at the head of the table, the good plate, everything on it hot, and he pulled the chair out and stood there holding it.

Iva laughed and said, "Oh, honey, no, let me get the rolls out."

And he said, "Rolls can burn. Sit down, Grandma."

And the whole kitchen was laughing at her, the good kind of laughing, and her daughter had hold of her elbow, and there was nothing for it. So she sat down at the head of her own table with a hot plate in front of her for the first time in fifty years.

And she did not know what to do with her hands.

That is the part she thought about all week. Not the plate. Her hands. She sat there with everybody talking and she genuinely did not know where to put them, because they had never been idle at that table before, and she found herself close to crying over a plate of green beans, which is not like her at all.

Now here is what this is really about, and you have already gotten there ahead of me.

What you have been serving out for fifty years is not food.

You have handed people comfort. You have handed people the promises, chapter and verse, at the right moment, in the right voice. You have carried peace into rooms that had none. And you have done it gladly and you would do it again tomorrow, and somewhere along the way it got settled in you that your part in all of it is the serving.

You have never once taken a plate.

Start with the strangest sentence in the covenant

There is a line in Moses's last song that turns the whole thing around, and most people read straight past it because it sounds like geography:

But the LORD's portion is his people, Jacob his allotted heritage.Deuteronomy 32:9

Read the direction of that sentence twice. The land got divided up and everybody took their share. And then Moses says that God took a share too, and God's share is not acreage. It is people.

You are what God took for Himself when the portions were handed out, and Deuteronomy 32:9 says it in plain words that have been sitting in the book the whole time, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a sentence like that from being about Israel in general to being about the woman standing at the counter with a fork.

Sit with that a second before you go on. Not the one who serves the portions. The portion.

And then there is what stands in your name

Now the other direction, because a covenant runs both ways and this is the half that has never been served onto your plate.

and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and fellow heirs with ChristRomans 8:17

Heirs of God. Not helpers of the heirs. Not the woman who keeps the kitchen while the family eats.

And an inheritance is a particular kind of thing, which is exactly why the Bible uses that word instead of a softer one. What you get by inheritance does not depend on your diligence. It depends entirely on whose name is on the document and whether the one who wrote it is dead or living, and in our case He is both, which settles it twice.

So the fork at the counter has nothing to do with it. You are an heir by name rather than by diligence, which is why Scripture reaches for the word inheritance instead of something softer, and why the Spirit of adoption in Romans 8:15 puts a child's word in a person's mouth and never a hired hand's.

So here is the whole message in one sentence, and you may say it back to me if you like. What has been left to you is settled and it is His to have settled; taking hold of it is your response and it is real and it is asked of you; and only one of those two is holding anything up, and it is not the one with the fork in it.

He named one of the things out loud

Now, what is actually in it. I am not going to make a list, because the moment a person starts totaling what is theirs the whole thing turns back into arithmetic. I want to hand you one thing, named by Jesus Himself, in the plain language of a man leaving something to somebody:

Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give to you.John 14:27

That is a bequest. Hear the verbs. Leave. Give. It is the language a person uses when they are going and they are naming what stays behind for whom.

And notice whose peace it is. Not peace in general, and not a good feeling about the circumstances. His own. The peace He had on the water and in front of Pilate is what He named and left, and John 14:27 has it written down, and the Holy Spirit is the One who carries that from the page into a kitchen where a woman is standing up to eat.

You have that in your name right now, this evening, unclaimed. Not coming. Not on the way. Left to you, in His own words, in writing.

Your side of it, and it is real

Here is what is asked, and I am not going to pretend it is nothing.

Take it. That is the response, and it is genuinely a thing you do. Reach your hand out and take hold, which is not a feeling and not a mood but an actual motion of a person's will. Nobody can do it for you, and a plate set in front of a woman who will not sit down goes cold at the head of the table exactly like it goes cold at the counter.

So it matters what you do. It has always mattered. What it does not do is buy anything, and what it does not do is hold the covenant together. Iva's grandson had that plate ready whether she sat or not. What her sitting did was let her eat.