Doing All Of It Just In Case

You could not have put a mug down on that counter.

There was a casserole half assembled at one end, the topping not on it, because the neighbor two doors along had come home from surgery on Thursday. Beside it a stack of cards, written, unaddressed. A bag of outgrown coats that had been by the door six weeks and had migrated to the counter for reasons nobody could reconstruct. A devotional with a ribbon at day four. A ball of yarn with about nine inches of scarf attached to it. And propped against the sugar, an envelope with sixteen things written on the back of it in three different pens.

Marta was moving fast between all of it and finishing none of it, and she was cheerful, which was the part that made Joy stop in the doorway.

Joy came in, put her own mug down on the one clear tile, and picked up the envelope.

"Can I read this?"

"It's just a list."

Joy read it. Sixteen. Some of them were errands and some of them were people and one of them just said the thing about Sunday.

"Marta," she said. "Which one of these did somebody actually ask you for?"

Marta stopped, with the casserole topping in one hand.

"I don't know," she said. "That's why I'm doing all of them."

And then she heard herself, and her face went, and Joy laughed first, which gave her permission, and then they were both laughing in a kitchen you could not have put a mug down in. Joy took the envelope gently out of her hand and turned it face down on the counter.

"So nobody asked."

"Nobody asked," Marta said. "But if one of them turns out to be the one, I want to have done it."

That is the sentence. Not laziness. Not rebellion. A woman running sixteen good things in parallel because she has never been told which one is being asked of her, and she is covering.

And you do this. Maybe not on an envelope. You do it in the shape of a week: yes to everything, because somewhere in the pile is the thing that was actually required, and if you do all of it you cannot have missed it. It is exhausting and it looks exactly like devotion from the outside, and underneath it is a person who has never once been told plainly what is asked.

It was told to you. That is the first thing.

There is a verse that people quote for the second half and skip the opening of, and the opening is the part you need.

He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?Micah 6:8

He has told you. Past tense, finished action, already done. The whole verse turns on that, and it means the thing you have been trying to guess was never hidden. There is no sealed envelope. There is no clause held back to see whether you would find it.

You are not being examined on something nobody read out to you. That is not my reassurance, it is the grammar of the sentence: Micah 6:8 says the telling already happened, and the Holy Spirit is why a line spoken to a crowd through a prophet arrives this morning addressed to one person in a kitchen.

Now read the ask itself, and read it as a shape rather than as three boxes. Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. That is not a checklist, and if you start ticking it you have turned a description of a person into a roster. Notice that the last clause is not a task at all. It is company. With your God is who you are walking beside, not what you are producing.

And here is the sentence this site is built to say, sitting in the middle of the teaching where it belongs rather than at the end where a disclaimer goes. God's oath is one half of this covenant and that half is settled: sworn, finished, holding without a thing from you. Your response is the other half, and it is real, and it is genuinely asked. It is simply not the half keeping this standing.

And the knowing is not on you either

Here is the part that undoes the sixteen. The assumption underneath it is that working out which one is the one is your job, and that if you get it wrong the cost falls on you. So you cover. But look at what God says He does about that.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.Psalm 32:8

Instruct. Teach. Counsel. Three verbs and all of them are His. He does not say discern correctly and I will honor it. He binds Himself to the telling.

You have a Guide who committed Himself in writing to the guiding, which means the sixteen were never necessary insurance. Psalm 32:8 is where He said it, and His Spirit is inside that promise now, doing the counseling rather than watching you audition for it.

Which does not mean nothing is asked. Hear that, because a woman with sixteen good things on an envelope is one sentence away from deciding that none of it mattered, and that would be its own kind of grief. It all mattered. Every card, every coat, every casserole. What was not asked of you was the covering. One thing is being asked of you in this season and you probably already know what it is, and it is almost certainly not sixteen.

And nobody is timing you. A slow yes is a yes. Marta had six weeks of coats by the door and the coats were not an accusation, they were a woman who was already carrying fifteen other things. There is no clock on this page and there is not one in Micah 6:8 either.