The Day You Stopped Marking

There is a yellow enamel jug on the top shelf of Pearl's kitchen cupboard, behind the good glasses, and it has not come down in six years.

It came from her grandmother's house along with a small paring knife with a handle worn to the shape of somebody else's thumb, and for eleven years those two things came out on one particular evening in the spring.

Her grandmother had done it every year of Pearl's childhood. The table cleared right down, the cloth on, flat bread on a board, bitter greens, a lamb dish that took most of the afternoon and made the whole stairwell smell of it, and the yellow jug in the middle full of something sweet. Then the story: how God brought a people out of a place they could never have got out of themselves. Her grandmother told it the same way every year, with the same pause in the same place, and at the end she said the same sentence about waiting for the King, and then everybody ate too much and the youngest one fell asleep under the table.

When her grandmother died, Pearl kept it going.

The first year she cooked for six. Two of those were people who came because they loved Pearl and had no idea what the evening was, and that was fine, and they had a lovely time. The third year it was four. By the seventh year it was Pearl and her son, and her son was nineteen and had a shift, and came for the first half.

Then it was Pearl.

She cooked the lamb dish for one person for three years running, which if you have ever done it you know is a specific kind of afternoon. She still laid the end place. She still told the story out loud, to a kitchen, because her grandmother had told it out loud and it seemed wrong to think it silently.

And the year she stopped, she did not decide anything.

She was tired that April. There had been a thing at work. Nobody had asked her about the evening in four years, and it had begun to feel, in a way she never said out loud, faintly embarrassing, like still putting out a stocking at fifty. The date went past. She noticed three days later, standing at the sink, and the noticing was not dramatic at all. It was a small drop, the way an unexpected step is a small drop.

The next year she did not either. And then it had been six.

She could still tell you exactly what that kitchen smelled like at half past seven on that evening. She could tell you where her grandmother put the paring knife down. She has never once told anybody that she misses it, because she cannot think of a way to say it that does not sound strange, and because underneath the missing there is a low steady sentence that goes: the year goes round and round and there is not one thing in it that belongs to Him.

If you have a jug on a top shelf, keep reading. I am not here to tell you to get it down. I am here to tell you whose diary the evening was actually in.

Whose appointment it was in the first place

Start with a phrase that gets read past constantly, because it is in the introduction rather than in the interesting part.

Concerning the feasts of the LORD, which ye shall proclaim to be holy convocations, even these are my feasts.Leviticus 23:2

My feasts. Twice in one verse God attaches them to Himself, and the word underneath the English is closer to an appointment than to a celebration: a fixed meeting time, agreed in advance, the sort of thing you write in a diary so that two parties turn up in the same place.

That changes who the keeper is.

An appointment is not kept alive by the enthusiasm of the person who was invited. It sits in the diary of whoever set it. Pearl has been carrying six years of quiet failure about an evening that was never on her calendar to begin with; it was on His, and it was on His before her grandmother was born.

So take this as already settled about you and not conditional on the last six Aprils: you are inside an invitation that has never once been withdrawn. Leviticus 23:2 calls them His own, and the Spirit who moved a man to write that possessive is the reason a person can still smell a kitchen from six years ago.

Then Luke, and this is the sentence I would put in front of everybody who has ever felt silly about wanting a day back.

With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer.Luke 22:15

Read the doubling. Not I would like to. Not it is customary. With desire I have desired. That is a man saying out loud how badly He wanted a particular meal, with particular people, on a particular evening, and He said it in a week when He had rather a lot else on His mind.

Whatever else you do with the appointed times, hold on to that. The one who set the appointment wanted the table more than anybody sitting at it did.

You have never once been the keenest person in that room, and Luke 22:15 is the proof of it in His own words; His Spirit is not asking you to work up an enthusiasm He already has in far greater supply.

Now the part I want to be careful about, because this is exactly where somebody usually hands you a new weight.

Let no man therefore judge you in meat, or in drink, or in respect of an holyday, or of the new moon, or of the sabbath days: which are a shadow of things to come; but the body is of Christ.Colossians 2:16-17

That verse is not me ruling on your calendar. I am not going to do that, in either direction, today or ever. What Paul does there is take the judge's chair out of the room and carry it outside, and once it is gone it is gone for everybody: the person who keeps a great many days does not get judged, and neither does the person who keeps none at all. If you have kept nothing for six years, or sixty, you are not standing outside anything, and His Spirit is not running a register at that door.

And then he says the thing that makes the whole category glad instead of heavy. A shadow of things to come.

A shadow is cast by something real that is on its way. Which means every one of those evenings was a rehearsal, and a rehearsal is not a lesser version of the event. It is the event, practiced early, by people who cannot wait.

That is what Pearl's grandmother was doing with her pause in the same place every year, and with her sentence about waiting for the King, and she was more right than she probably knew.

And he saith unto me, Write, Blessed are they which are called unto the marriage supper of the Lamb.Revelation 19:9

There is a supper coming. You have already been called to it, and Ephesians 1:14 names the Holy Spirit in you as the earnest, the down payment, money already handed over on a thing that has not been delivered yet; so the looking forward in your chest is not sentiment, it is deposit.