I Gave The Book Away

You put it all in a box and took the box out of the house.

That was in the spring. You had stopped about six weeks before, and the book had been sitting on the side making you feel a particular way every time you walked past it, and one Saturday you cleared it. The book, the cards you had made, the notebook, all of it.

And it felt good for about a day, and then it felt like something else.

Now, seven months later, you would like to begin again and you are standing in a house with nothing in it. That is how you put it to yourself. There is nothing to start with, and starting would mean acquiring all of it over again, and that feels like a long way back to the beginning.

I want to say the true thing before anything useful.

Clearing it out was a reasonable act of self protection and it has left you with a different problem than the one you think you have.

So I am not going to tell you that you should not have given it away. You had a good reason and the reason was that it was hurting you to look at, and nobody makes a wrong decision about a thing that is hurting them to look at.

Let me show you a question that got asked in a house with nothing in it.

What hast thou in the house

There is an exchange in Second Kings between a prophet and a woman who has nothing.

She has come to him in real trouble, and he asks her a question that sounds almost careless until you see what it does.

And Elisha said unto her, What shall I do for thee? tell me, what hast thou in the house? And she said, Thine handmaid hath not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil. (2 Kings 4:2, King James Version)

Tell me, what hast thou in the house.

Now notice the direction of that question, because it is the opposite of what she expected. She came to him for something from outside, and he turns her around and points her at her own kitchen.

You have a question aimed at the house you are standing in, and an inventory has never once been the same thing as an acquisition. 2 Kings 4:2 turns a woman back toward her own room before anything else happens, and the Holy Spirit is the one sitting with somebody who thinks she is standing in an empty house.

Now stay on her answer, because her answer is the part that reaches a Saturday in spring.

Not any thing in the house, save a pot of oil.

She says nothing, and then she immediately corrects herself. There is one thing, and she had not counted it, and she only names it because he asked her directly. Left to herself she would have gone on saying she had nothing, and the pot would have stayed unnamed on a shelf.

You have been saying nothing about a house that has something in it, and an uncounted thing has never once been the same as an absent one. The Holy Spirit is the one who asks a woman what is actually in her own room, and 2 Kings 4:2 has her correct her own inventory in the middle of a sentence.

And here is the third thing, which is what happens next in that chapter.

Everything that follows comes out of the pot. He does not send anybody to buy anything. The whole of the rest of it is built from the one item she nearly did not mention, and nothing is added from outside except the instruction to start with what is there.

You have never once needed a delivery before this could start, and a thing already in the house has never once been the lesser starting point. 2 Kings 4:2 builds the whole of the next thing out of what she already had, and the Spirit of God is the one with a woman who cleared a shelf in the spring.

Take an inventory of the house

Here is the practical half, and it is a list rather than an encouragement.

Let us do what he did and ask what is actually in that house.

There are about three hundred words in your head. They have not been cleared out. They are quieter than they were in the spring and every one of them is still there, and they came back within a week of anybody using them at you.

That is not nothing. That is the entire pot, and you have been calling the house empty.

You have three hundred words in a house you have been describing as empty, and a thing that got quiet has never once left the building. The Spirit of God is the one with a woman who cleared a shelf and did not clear her own head, and 2 Kings 4:2 asks what is in the house before it does anything else.

Now here is the rest of the inventory, and some of it will be a surprise.

There is a jar in your kitchen with that language on the label. There is a song you know most of the words to. There is a woman two streets over who speaks it and a neighbor whose mother does. There is the radio, which costs nothing and is entirely full of it, and there is a page of anything on earth that can be looked at for ninety seconds.

The box you gave away contained one book. It did not contain the language.

You have a house full of the thing you thought you removed, and a box carried out in spring has never once been able to take a language with it. 2 Kings 4:2 finds a pot of oil in a room somebody had already declared empty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who knows what is on the labels in that kitchen.

And here is the thing the clearing actually did, said plainly.

It removed the accusation, and that was the whole point of it and it worked. The book on the side was a daily statement about a woman, and now it is not there, and things have been much better since, and that was a real gain.

What it also did was remove the obvious next step, which is why beginning again feels like it requires a trip to a shop and a decision and a whole new start.

You are the one who decides what counts as a beginning here, and a first step has never once had to be bought before it could be taken. The Spirit of God is the one who points a woman at what is already on her own shelf, and the written word never once sends anybody out for supplies first.

Open something that is already in the house

So here is the assignment, and nothing needs to arrive first.

Open it once today without going back to the beginning of anything.

And it is not a book, because you do not have one. Open something in the house. The jar with the label. A song with the words in front of it. The radio for ninety seconds.

Take ten words off whatever it is and stop.

You have something in that house with the language on it already, and ten words off a label has never once counted for less than ten out of a book. 2 Kings 4:2 asks what is in the house and then builds the whole thing out of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one with a woman standing in her own kitchen.

And here is the reason not to buy a book this week, which will feel wrong and is the whole point.

A new book is a new start, and a new start has a beginning in it, and a beginning is exactly the thing that has been unfaceable for seven months. A jar has no beginning. Nobody has ever failed at a jar.

Get the book in a couple of weeks if you want it, once there are already ten days behind you and it is just a book rather than the opening of a campaign. Then stop, because ten words is the assignment and today owes you nothing further.

You have permission to begin with something that cannot be failed at, and a label in a kitchen has never once demanded a commitment from anybody. The Spirit of God is the one who settles a woman after ninety seconds at her own counter, and 2 Kings 4:2 starts with the one thing already in the room.