The Empty Square on the Fridge

The magnet is shaped like a pineapple and it has been on that fridge door for eleven years.

For eleven of those years there was a sheet of paper under it, printed at the library, one week per sheet, and the Sunday column had a line in every single row.

Seven twenty, leave the house. Eight, open up and put the chairs out, six across, twelve back, aisle down the middle. Nine fifteen, prayer in the small room with the broken blind. Doors. Coffee. The rota for the following month if it was the first week. Twelve forty, chairs away, mop the spill, count the mugs. Home for an hour and a half. Back at four for the evening.

Bernice could have done that day with her eyes shut and some Sundays very nearly did.

She has not been in that building since the winter before last. The magnet is still on the fridge. There is nothing under it.

She has tried a couple of things. She cleaned the oven one Sunday and it took two hours and she felt almost herself the whole time, which is a strange sentence to have to write about an oven. Another Sunday she reorganized the airing cupboard. A third she drove out to the reservoir path, parked, and sat in the car for forty minutes watching a man throw a ball for a dog, and then drove home without ever opening the door.

She has plenty of hours. That is not the problem. She had fewer hours before and never once wondered what to do with them.

The problem is that Sunday used to be a job, and she was good at it, and now Sunday is a wide gray square with nothing written in it, and a woman who spent eleven years being needed by nine o'clock does not know how to be a person by nine o'clock.

She said one thing out loud in the car at the reservoir, to nobody, with the engine off.

I do not know what I am for on a Sunday.

Then she drove home and cleaned an oven that was already clean.

Nobody ever taught you how to be fed

I have no standing whatsoever to tell you what to do with your Sunday.

But Ezekiel 34 has, and it says something so plain that most of us have read straight past it for years.

I shall feed them in good pasture, and their fold shall be on the high mountains of Israel. There they shall lie down in a good fold and feed in rich pasture on the mountains of Israel. I myself shall feed my flock, and I myself shall make them lie down, declares the Lord God.Ezekiel 34:14-15

Count the verbs that belong to God in those two verses. Feed. Make them lie down. Feed again. Now count the verbs that belong to the sheep. Lie down, and eat.

That is the whole job. You are not the shepherd on that hillside and you never were, whatever a rota on a fridge door taught your hands, and the Spirit of God has been saying that over a woman sitting in a parked car for eighteen months.

Notice the doubling in Ezekiel 34:15, because Hebrew does not waste a repetition. I myself. Twice, one clause after another, like somebody putting a hand flat on a table. The chapter it sits in is a chapter about a scattered flock, and God's answer to scattering is not a better rota. His answer is that He does the feeding personally, and His Spirit was the one who wrote that down centuries before anybody had a fridge to pin anything to.

And here is the thing that nobody will say to you gently enough, so I will say it plainly.

For eleven years, your food came standing up.

It came while you carried chairs. It came in fragments, in the second half of a song heard on the way past, in a verse somebody said to you in the car park. A person learns to live on that, and gets very good at living on that, and then genuinely does not know what to do when somebody hands them a chair.

Hear what the Shepherd is actually holding out, because it is not a tidier version of the same arrangement. Ezekiel 34:14 puts the flock in a good fold on the high mountains, and the only two things asked of a sheep in that fold are eating and lying down. You have a seat there and not a shift, and the Spirit who moved on Ezekiel is the one pulling that chair out for a woman who has forgotten how to sit in one.

Pasture is not wages

I want to guard something here, because this is where the whole thing can go wrong in one sentence.

The pasture in Ezekiel 34 is not a reward. Read the chapter and you will find no line where God explains that the good grass is given to the sheep who held out longest. Grass is what a shepherd gives sheep. That is what shepherds are. The Spirit is not offering you a better season because you survived a hard one, and He is not measuring how quickly you learn to enjoy a Sunday.

Which means the blank square is not a test either.

You are not being assessed on what you put in it. There is no right answer and no wrong answer and no scoreboard on the back of the fridge door. Scripture puts the feeding on God and the lying down on you, and the Spirit who wrote that line is the same Spirit who will not now stand over you with a clipboard while you try to enjoy an afternoon.

Sit with that, because your hands will fight it. Hands that have carried chairs for eleven years want a task by half past nine.