The Photograph on the Refrigerator

The photograph is not a good one. It is slightly out of focus and somebody's elbow is in the left of it.

It is a Sunday in August nine years ago and she is standing outside a building with two women whose names she still says when she prays. She is squinting. She is not aware the picture is being taken. And that morning, about forty minutes before somebody held up a phone, something happened to her that she has never had adequate words for.

It has been on the refrigerator door ever since, under a magnet shaped like a strawberry that her granddaughter chose.

She looks at it most days. Not sentimentally, or not only. What she is doing when she looks at it, and she has begun to understand this, is checking.

Because the way she has come to hold that morning is as proof. It is the thing she can point at when the days go flat. It sits in her mind the way a receipt sits in a drawer, and receipts are for producing when somebody questions whether a thing was ever paid for.

And the flatness has gone on a long time now. Two years, maybe three, and she is a truthful woman and has stopped pretending otherwise to herself.

Here is what she has never said aloud, and she is a plain speaking woman, so the fact that she has not said it is itself telling. It goes: if I ask for that again, and nothing happens, then I will have spent the receipt and got nothing back for it.

So she does not ask. She looks at the photograph instead.

You may have your own photograph. The proof you keep where you can see it and will not risk.

Written to a man in her position

There is a short line in a letter from an old man to a younger one, and it was written to somebody standing exactly where she is standing.

Wherefore I put thee in remembrance that thou stir up the gift of God, which is in thee by the putting on of my hands.2 Timothy 1:6

Timothy had a day. A real one, with people around him, and something given. Paul refers to it the way one person refers to something two people both remember.

And what Paul does not say is worth noticing first. He does not say the gift left. He does not accuse Timothy of losing it or of doing something that put it out. He does not say the day was a fraud.

He says, plainly and without drama, that the thing needs stirring up again, and he assumes this is normal enough that it takes one sentence and no apology.

You are being written to by somebody who expected this exact stretch, and 2 Timothy 1:6 has a man told to stir up a genuine gift years after a genuine day, and it is His Spirit who takes a note between two people in the first century and lands it on a woman standing at her own refrigerator.

Stirring is what you do to a fire that is still lit

Look at the picture in that word, because it is a household one and she will know it in her hands.

You stir a fire that is banked. Not a dead one. A fire with coals still in it that has gone quiet under the ash, and stirring is what somebody does in the morning to bring the heat back up out of what is already there. Nobody stirs an empty grate.

That is the whole diagnosis and it is much gentler than the one she has been carrying. She has been assuming that flatness means absence. Paul assumes that flatness means banked.

You have coals under that and not an empty grate, because the written word tells a man to stir a gift that is in him rather than to go and get another one, and the Holy Spirit is what turns that from a comforting picture into something she can act on before the biscuits come out.

And notice that Paul puts the doing on Timothy without putting the supply on him. Stir it up, he says. He does not say produce it. The action asked of the man is small and the thing being acted on was given.

You are asked for a stir and never for a supply, and 2 Timothy 1 leaves the gift where God put it and asks only that somebody reach into it, and the same Spirit who moved a man to write that from a prison cell moves it into a kitchen in the afternoon.

The photograph was never the collateral

Now the fear that has actually stopped her, which is the one about spending the receipt.

Take it apart, because it rests on a picture of God that will not survive being said out loud. It imagines a God who issues one thing, keeps a ledger of it, and would count a second request as a claim against the first.

Nothing in that letter behaves that way. Paul is not warning Timothy to be careful with a limited allocation. He is telling him to go back in and stir, and the tone throughout is a man encouraging his son, not an accountant reviewing a balance.

You were never holding collateral, because 2 Timothy 1:6 treats a further stirring as ordinary and expected rather than as a draw against anything, and it is the Spirit of God who makes that a door she can walk through with the photograph still on the door.