The Pantry Is Full and I Am Not

She put up eighty four quarts this year.

Tomatoes, mostly. Green beans, corn, two dozen of the chow chow that her husband will eat with anything, peaches from the tree that finally came in. The jars are down the cellar steps on shelves her father built, and they are labeled, and they are rotated, and if the power went out in January this family would eat.

She is good at this and she does not apologize for it. There is a competence in her hands that came down through three women and it is a real inheritance.

What happened this year was small and it will not sound like anything.

She was carrying the last flat of quart jars down the cellar steps in the middle of September, and she set them on the shelf and squared them up the way she does, and she stood there in the cool with the light from the stairwell coming down, and she looked at the whole wall of it.

Everything on that wall is for somebody. The chow chow is for him. The peaches are for the grandchildren when they come. The tomatoes are for the winter, which is for everybody. She could walk the shelves and tell you who each row is for.

And she thought, without any drama in it at all: there is nothing on this wall for me.

Not that she wants a jar. She is not sentimental and she would tell you that idea is foolish. What she means, and what she has not managed to say to anybody since, is that she has spent forty years provisioning a household against every hard thing she can name, and she has nothing laid by for the thing that is actually running out.

She does not have a word for it. The nearest she gets is that she feels scraped.

You may know the cellar step. Provided for everybody, and thin in a place you cannot stock.

The one shelf you cannot stock

Start with what she is doing right, because there is a lot of it and a woman like this will not hear anything else until it has been said.

Putting up food is not a failure of trust. Provision is not anxiety. Half the book of Proverbs is admiring exactly what she does with a September afternoon, and God is not standing in that cellar wanting her to be less capable.

The trouble is narrower and it is a matter of kind. There is one thing running low in her that does not come in quarts, and no amount of skill applied to the other kind puts any of it back. She has been trying to work harder at the category she is good at, which is the sane response and the wrong one, because the shortage is not in that category.

You are not short on capability, and Jeremiah 31:25 names the weary soul specifically, which is a different shelf from the one she stocks, and it is His Spirit who makes an old promise land on a woman standing in a cellar in September.

Here is the whole sentence, and it is worth reading slowly because it is only two clauses long.

For I have satiated the weary soul, and I have replenished every sorrowful soul.Jeremiah 31:25

Look at the verbs. Satiated and replenished. Both of them mean filled up again, and both of them are in the first person, and the first person is God.

Nobody replenishes themselves

Consider the word replenish. It is a word about stores. It is exactly what she does in September.

And in that sentence she is not the one doing it. She is the pantry.

That is the reversal she has never once considered, and it will take a minute, because a woman who has been the provider in her house since she was twenty two does not have a slot for being provisioned. Everything in her is set up to be the one carrying the flat of jars down the stairs.

You have been the one stocking the shelves and you were always meant to be stocked yourself, because the written word puts the verb in God's mouth and the weary soul on the receiving end, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from an idea she agrees with into a thing she lets happen.

And notice the second clause, because it widens without warning. Every sorrowful soul. Not the ones who asked correctly. Not the ones who kept up. Every.

She will want to know what she has to do for that. The honest answer, which is going to sit strangely with her, is that the passage assigns her nothing at all. God has taken both verbs. There is no third clause where the soul does its part.

You have no part to perform in that sentence, because Jeremiah 31 hands both verbs to God and leaves the weary soul nothing at all to do, and it is the Spirit of God who makes a missing third clause feel like rest rather than a trick.

Weary is not a failing

Now the thing she has been carrying quietly, which is that being this scraped must mean something is wrong with her.

She has been running the accounts on it. Maybe she took on too much with her mother. Maybe she should have said no to the church supper. Maybe a stronger woman would not be standing in a cellar feeling like this at sixty one.

Set that down, because Jeremiah does not treat weariness as a charge. He treats it as an address. The weary soul is not being corrected in that verse. It is being located, the way you locate a house you are delivering to.

You are a delivery address and not a case to be reviewed, and Jeremiah 31 names weariness as the thing that qualifies rather than the thing that disqualifies, and the same Spirit who spoke that to a worn out people speaks it down a cellar stairwell.

Which also means the dryness in her is not a bill she ran up. Forty years of pouring out into a household is not poor management. It is what a life spent on people looks like from the inside, and God is not standing at the bottom of the steps with a clipboard.