The Cake Still in the Box

There is a white cardboard box on the middle shelf of Alan's fridge and it has been there four days.

Inside it is a cake with his daughter's name piped across the top in green icing, and it is starting to do the thing cakes do in a fridge, which is go cold and hard at the edges and stop being quite the cake it was.

It has been a good spring. That is the important part and it belongs at the front, because the good is the bit Alan cannot handle.

Work has been steady since February, first time in years. His mum's results came back clear in March and the consultant used the word delighted, which consultants do not throw about. His daughter finished her course in May and passed it, and there was an afternoon in the garden where somebody put music on and his brother in law made a speech standing on an upturned plant pot and fell off it.

And on the Tuesday, Alan went and bought the cake. He carried it home flat on both hands the whole way, like a man carrying something molten.

Then he put it in the fridge and said they would cut it when everybody was here.

On the Wednesday his daughter said, are we having that cake then. He said leave it till the weekend, till your nan can get over.

On the Thursday his son stood with the fridge door open long enough that Alan said something about the electric.

On the Friday his wife, who has been married to him nineteen years and knows the shape of him better than he does, said very quietly that everybody was here. All of them. In this kitchen, now. And that his nan had actually been over on Sunday.

Alan said, right.

And did not cut the cake.

He is eleven years without picking up. Eleven. And what he thinks, and has never said out loud to a living soul, is this: a cut cake cannot be un-cut, and good stretches are the run-up.

That is the whole of it. In his experience good is what happens just before. Every bad thing in his life so far has come in on the back of a good month, and he has never once managed to prove it wrong, so he has learned to stand slightly to one side of anything nice, weight on the back foot, coat over his arm.

He is not miserable. He would tell you he is having a lovely spring. He is having a lovely spring, standing up.

And here is where I stop talking about Alan.

Because there is a good thing in your life right now that you have not sat down inside. You know exactly which one. You have been polite about it and grateful about it, and you have not once let your weight go onto it.

Who is pouring

Everyone serves the good wine first, and when people have drunk freely, then the poor wine. But you have kept the good wine until now.John 2:10

That is the master of the feast at a wedding in Cana, and he is not making a spiritual point. He is quoting a rule of the trade. Bring the good out first while people are paying attention, and bring the ordinary out later when nobody is checking. Hold that sentence where you can see it, because the Spirit is about to turn it over in your hands.

Your version runs the other way round and it is the same rule underneath. Good comes first, then the bad, and the good is how a man knows the bad is on its way. You are living by a rule the steward at that wedding would have shaken your hand over, and John 2 is the one place in Scripture where somebody walks into a house and quietly breaks it, and the Holy Spirit has you standing in that doorway this morning.

There is a detail two verses earlier that is easy to walk straight past. The master of the feast did not know where the wine had come from. The servants who had drawn the water knew. The lads carrying the jars, wet sleeves, no standing whatever in that house, were the only people in the building who knew who was pouring. You are one of those, and the Spirit is not asking you to work out the vintage, He is telling you whose hands filled the jars.

Now I want to be straight with you about what I am not saying, because you have been promised things before by men in a hurry.

You are not being told that the good spring lasts. I do not know that. Nobody handing that information out has been authorized to, and a man who promises you a summer has left you holding something the day it turns. What I can tell you is written down in James 1:17: every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, with whom there is no variation and no shadow cast by turning. Seasons turn. He does not, and the Holy Spirit is saying that over a kitchen with a box in the fridge.

I have no authority to tell your nerves to stand down. Psalm 34:8 has, and it uses a verb that is almost rude in how plain it is: taste and see that the Lord is good. Taste. Not assess. Not stand near it. You are invited to put the thing in your mouth, and the Spirit is the one who makes an invitation like that land in a man who has spent eleven years positioned slightly to one side of nice.

The Holy Spirit is doing something with your hands as you read, and the ground under it is the way that wedding actually went. Nobody was interviewed at Cana. There was no assessment of whether that family had earned a second round, and the account is careful to say the six stone jars were filled to the brim, which is a detail John keeps in on purpose. You are in a house where the Lord fills things right to the top without being asked to.

So ask the question that is actually in front of you, and it is not whether this holds. That one has never been answered to anybody's satisfaction and it is not going to be answered on this page. The question is who is pouring, and John 2 says it is the Lord Himself, and His Spirit is holding that up in front of you while a cake goes hard in a box.

And if this has not been a good spring, if the last few weeks have been the old weeks, then read this line before anybody else does. Nothing at that wedding was earned by a single person in the room, and the Holy Spirit does not measure the good wine out according to how the guest has been getting on.