The Jug That Ran Over My Hand

She fills the jug at the big sink because the small tap runs slow, and on Thursday it ran over her hand and she stood there for a second longer than she needed to.

Forty bags to pack. Two volunteers short. The bread had come late and there was a woman waiting in the corridor who had been waiting a while and who she was going to have to talk to properly.

She has run that kitchen for six years.

She is good at it and she does not say so. There are people in that town who eat on Thursdays because she is organized, and she knows the names of about ninety of them, and she knows which two of them will not take a bag unless she hands it over herself.

Here is what happened at the sink, which she has told nobody.

The water went over her hand and she thought, quite clearly and with no drama attached to it at all: I am the only jug in this building that nobody fills.

Then she turned the tap off and went and packed forty bags.

She has tried the things. An early morning for a while. A book somebody gave her. A weekend away in February that she enjoyed and which lasted, as far as she can tell, about four days. None of it is wrong and none of it holds, and she has begun to suspect that the fault is in the container.

You may know that sink. Everybody's cup going out, and nothing coming the other way.

The filling was never on her side

Look at the sentence Jesus ends with after a long stretch of teaching about asking, because the shape of it is the answer to a woman at a sink.

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children: how much more shall your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to them that ask him?Luke 11:13

Read the comparison He builds. Ordinary parents, described bluntly as evil, still manage to hand their children good things. That is the floor. And then the whole weight of the sentence goes into two words.

How much more.

He is arguing from the least reliable version of giving up to the most reliable, and the thing at the top of the argument is the Holy Spirit given to anybody who asks.

You are dealing with a Father described as the far end of that comparison, and Luke 11:13 puts ordinary human giving at the bottom and God at the top with how much more in between, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a long teaching about asking and lands it on a woman with a jug running over her hand.

Asking is the whole of the human part

Consider what is required of the person in that verse, because it is the shortest job description in the chapter.

To them that ask Him.

That is it. Not to them that have kept up. Not to them that have organized well or served long or arrived rested. The whole of the human contribution in that sentence is one verb and it takes about four seconds to do.

She has spent six years being the person other people ask, and it has quietly become difficult for her to occupy the other side of that transaction, which is a very common thing to happen to a competent woman and is not a character defect.

You have one part in this and it is the smallest word in the verse, because the written word makes asking the entire condition and attaches nothing else to it, and His Spirit is what turns a grammatical observation into something she can do standing at a sink.

And notice how the passage gets there. It opens with a man banging on a neighbor's door at midnight for bread he does not have, which is a story about somebody in the middle of an emergency with nothing prepared. Jesus does not use a tidy example. He uses a man with an empty cupboard and a guest already in the house.

You are exactly the person in the story that teaching is built on, and Luke 11 sets the whole argument on a man with nothing at midnight, and the same Spirit who is named at the end of it is the one who fills.

Nothing about the Thursday is a barrier

Now the suspicion about the container, because she has been carrying it for a while and it is worth taking apart.

She has decided, quietly, that the reason nothing holds is that something about her does not keep what goes in. Six years of good things arriving and draining out, and the only variable that has been present the whole time is her.

That is honest reasoning and it is the wrong conclusion, because none of the things she has tried was ever a supply. An early morning is a good arrangement. A book is good input. A weekend is a good rest. Every one of those arranges a person and none of them fills one, and a woman running on nothing will finish all three still running on nothing.

You are not a leaking container, because Luke 11:13 makes the Father the giver and the asker the receiver and never once puts the supply on the person, and it is His Spirit who makes that a relief rather than one more thing to work on.