The Drawer Of Things With No Name

There is a drawer in your house that you could not explain.

Not the sentimental one. That one is fine. Everyone understands photographs and a child's first shoes and a letter from somebody who is gone.

This is the other one. The one with the small blue plastic thing in it that you have kept for nine years, and a smooth stone, and a piece of fabric about the size of a hand, and a bottle top.

If somebody opened that drawer and asked you about the blue thing, you would not be able to tell them. Not because it is private. Because there is no reason, or at least not one that survives being said in a sentence.

And that drawer is the one that carries the shame.

The sentimental drawer is defensible. This one is not, and being unable to defend something is the exact condition under which a person starts to feel odd about themselves.

So let me go at that directly today, because I think you have been paying a price for a thing that was never a debt.

The idea that a kept object owes an explanation is not in scripture anywhere. It came from somewhere else, and it has been charging you for years.

A pot of it was kept on purpose

There is an instruction in Exodus about a container of bread that had no use whatsoever.

Take a pot, and put an omer full of manna therein, and lay it up before the LORD, to be kept for your generations. (Exodus 16:33, King James Version)

Read what that object actually was. A jar of food that could not be eaten, kept indefinitely, on purpose, by divine instruction.

It had no function. It fed nobody. It was not a resource and it was not decoration, and it went into the most sacred place the nation had, and it stayed there for generations.

You are keeping things the way that pot was kept, and a kept thing has never once had to be useful to be right. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who cannot explain a small blue thing, and Exodus 16:33 has God instruct the keeping of an object with no use at all.

And now the part that matters most for your drawer.

Nowhere is an ongoing justification required. The pot did not have to earn its place every year. It was laid up, and it stayed, and no generation was asked to re-explain it to the next one.

You have never once been asked for an annual defense of what you keep, and no such requirement exists anywhere in the text. The written word instructs a keeping and then leaves it alone, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with a man who has been quietly paying a charge nobody issued.

Where the requirement came from

So if the requirement is not in scripture, where did it come from?

It came from a way of thinking about objects that measures everything by use. Under that measure, a thing that does nothing is waste, and a person who keeps waste has a problem.

That measure works well in a workshop. It is a disaster applied to a drawer in a kitchen, because most of what makes a life is not useful and was never meant to be.

You were applying a workshop measure to a drawer, and that measure has never once been the right instrument for it. The Holy Spirit is the one present with a man who has been auditing his own kitchen with the wrong tool, and Exodus 16:33 sets a useless object in the holiest place there was.

And here is the specific damage it does.

It makes the unexplainable things the worst things. Under a use measure, the blue plastic item is the most indefensible object in the house, when in fact it is probably the most harmless, and the shame has been sitting on exactly the wrong drawer for years.

You have had the shame filed on the wrong drawer entirely, and the harmless things have never once deserved it. The written word keeps a pot of uneaten bread for generations without apology, and the Spirit of God is the one who steadies a man who has been embarrassed by a bottle top.

Saying it without a reason

So the assignment tonight has a twist in it, and the twist is the point.

Pick up one thing you kept. Say out loud why you kept it. And if the honest answer is that there is no reason, say that, out loud, as the reason.

You are allowed to say out loud that there is no reason, and no reason has never once been a worse answer than a reason. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with a man holding a piece of blue plastic in a kitchen, and Exodus 16:33 requires no explanation at all for the pot.

Here is what that sentence does.

Saying I do not know why I kept this, out loud, ends the audit. It does not answer the question, it retires it. And the audit was the whole weight, not the object, which has always weighed almost nothing.

You are retiring a question rather than answering it, and no answer has ever once been owed on that drawer. The written word lays a useless thing up before God and closes the subject, and the Spirit of God is the one present with a man ending an audit that has run for nine years.