It Turned Out to Be a Casserole

She is sixty and she has been asking for something for a long time, and she has always known roughly what it looked like.

Not a performance. She would push back hard on that. She is not a woman who wants a platform and she has never once wanted to be looked at. What she has wanted is weight. Something with power in it. The sense that when she prayed for a person something happened that could not be explained by her being a nice woman with good instincts.

She has had that picture since she was about thirty and it has never really altered.

What has actually happened, over thirty years, is a great deal of ordinary.

Casseroles. Fourteen or fifteen a year, easily, for people in the middle of something. Phone calls she does not want to make and makes anyway. Sitting in a hospital corridor with somebody for four hours, twice, when nobody else could get there. A card she sent every month for two years to a woman who never once answered and who thanked her at a funeral.

Nobody in her county thinks she is powerful. Quite a lot of them would tell you she is the one who comes.

And she has quietly filed the whole of it under something other than an answer.

The sentence, unsaid: I asked for something with weight and what I got was a casserole dish.

You may know that filing. Thirty years of the ordinary, sorted under the wrong heading.

What actually gets poured out

There is a line in Romans that names, specifically, the substance the Holy Spirit pours into a person, and it is worth reading before deciding what was and was not given.

Because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us.Romans 5:5

Read what is shed abroad. Not power in the abstract. Not an experience. Love. The love of God, poured out, and the agent of the pouring is named as the Holy Spirit.

That is the one place Paul tells us what is going into the container, and it is the least dramatic and most consequential substance in the letter.

It is worth sitting with how much that verse could have said and does not. Paul is a man who had seen a great deal. He had things he could have named there, and readers who would have been thrilled to hear about them, and the sentence he actually writes is about love arriving in an ordinary heart by the Holy Spirit. Nothing in the New Testament is more anticlimactic on first reading and nothing in it is harder to argue with after thirty years.

You have had the actual named substance poured into you, and Romans 5:5 says the love of God is shed abroad in hearts by the Holy Spirit rather than describing anything spectacular, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from the middle of an argument and lands it on a woman with a foil pan in her hands.

Shed abroad is a large phrase

Consider the verb, because in English it has gone quiet and in the original it is anything but.

Shed abroad translates a word about pouring out lavishly, spilling, an amount beyond what the vessel needs. It is not a measured dose. It is the language of something being poured until it runs over the sides, and Paul chooses it deliberately to describe what has happened in an ordinary believer.

So the question of whether she received anything with weight in it is answered in that verse, and answered generously. The question is only what she was expecting the weight to look like.

You have been given something poured out past the brim, because the written word uses the language of spilling rather than of measuring, and the Spirit of God is what turns a translation note into a completely different reading of thirty years.

And notice the ordering in the chapter. That sentence sits at the end of a passage about endurance, about a person going through something and being changed by it, and love is what Paul reaches for as the evidence that God has not disappointed anybody. Not signs. Love, in a person, doing what love does.

You are the evidence that verse points at, and Romans 5 offers poured out love as the answer to the question of whether God has let somebody down, and the same Spirit who does the pouring is the one who fills.

The casseroles are not the consolation prize

Now the thing that would ruin this article if it were left unsaid, because there is a version of what has been written above that is condescending.

Nobody is telling her that a casserole is what she gets instead of power. That would be a pat on the head and she would be right to reject it.

The claim is stronger. It is that fourteen dishes a year for thirty years, and the corridor, and the card sent monthly to a woman who never replied, is the visible edge of the exact substance Romans 5 names, and that a person who does that for three decades has been running on something they did not manufacture. Nobody keeps that up on temperament. Temperament runs out around year four.

And notice which of those things cost her the most. Not the cooking, which she enjoys. The corridor, and the card. Both of them were the kind of thing a person does with no encouragement at all, over a long period, with no evidence that any of it registered anywhere. That is not niceness. Niceness is cheap and it stops when it stops being pleasant, and hers did not stop.

You have been running on something you never generated, because Romans 5:5 names the love as poured in by the Holy Spirit rather than produced by the person, and it is His Spirit who makes that a fact about a woman of sixty rather than a compliment about her character.