Three Boxes on the Porch

There are three boxes on the porch and she does not want to open any of them.

She knows what is in all three. A set of drawer organizers, which she does want, in an abstract way, on some Saturday that has not been scheduled. A book she read about and will read. And a lamp, which was thirty one dollars and which she chose carefully over about forty minutes on a Tuesday night.

The forty minutes was the point. She understands that now, which is the uncomfortable part.

Here is the shape of it, and she could draw it on paper.

The lift starts somewhere in the choosing. It builds through the comparing and the reading of the reviews and the deciding. It peaks at the checkout, which is a very specific and quite small pleasure, about four seconds long. Then there is a second, weaker lift when the notification says it shipped. Then a third, weaker still, when the box appears on the porch.

And then nothing. The box sits there. Opening it is administration. Whatever the thing was for, it stopped being for that somewhere between the porch and the front door.

She is not in trouble financially. It would be easier if she were, honestly, because then there would be a number that made this a problem and somebody would help her about it. Thirty one dollars is nothing. It is nothing eleven times a month, which is still not very much, and that is exactly why nobody has ever said anything.

What she has not said to anybody is the arithmetic underneath. It goes: whatever this is, it runs out in about a day, and I have to go and get more.

You will have your own version of the porch. The small good thing that works exactly as long as it takes to get home.

Every outside supply has to be fetched again

Start by taking the shame out of it, because shame will not help her and it is also not accurate.

A lamp is not a sin. Liking the choosing is not a character defect. God is not standing on the porch counting boxes. There is nothing in what she is doing that a reasonable person would call a crisis, and part of what makes it so persistent is that it never crosses any line she could point to.

The useful thing to see is a shape, not a fault. What she has is a supply that comes from outside her and therefore has to be fetched. Fetched supplies always have a half life. That is not a moral property, it is a physical one, and it applies to the lamp exactly the way it applies to a bucket of water carried up a hill.

Which is precisely the distinction Jesus draws, and He draws it at a well, to a woman who had come to fetch.

But whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life.John 4:14

Look at where He puts it. Not on the counter. In him. The whole contrast is between a supply you go and get and a supply that is sited inside the person.

You are being offered a source and not a delivery, and John 4:14 puts the well inside the one who drinks rather than out at the end of a path, and it is the Spirit of God who takes a conversation at a stone well at noon and lands it on a porch with three boxes on it.

Springing up is not something she does

Consider the phrase springing up. It is not a word about effort. Nobody springs a spring. Water that springs is water under pressure from below, and the only thing the ground does is let it through.

That matters here more than almost anything else, because she is a competent woman and her instinct with any problem is to run it better. Given a diagnosis she would build a system. She would set a rule about purchases, or a waiting period, or a budget line, and she would keep it, because she keeps things.

And a system would work about as well as the lamp does.

You have a spring and not a schedule, because the written word describes water rising on its own rather than being drawn on a schedule of the drinker's making, and the Spirit of God is what makes that stop being a lovely image and start being a relief.

Notice also what Jesus does not say. He does not say she will never want anything again. He says she will never thirst in the way she is thirsting now, at that well, with a jar, at noon, arranging her day around the fetching.

You are not being asked to stop wanting things, and John 4 leaves her a whole ordinary life with ordinary appetites in it, and the same Spirit who spoke that at a well is the one who separates a lamp from a supply.

Nothing about the boxes is a barrier

Now the objection she has not voiced, which is that this all sounds like something for people who have their lives in better order than she does.

The woman at that well had five husbands behind her and was living with a man who was not one of them, and Jesus does not resolve any of that before He offers her the water. He mentions it. He does not make it a condition. The offer is on the table for the whole conversation.

And there is no setting attached. No temple, no mountain, no priest, which is exactly what she asks Him about and exactly what He sets aside. A woman at a well in the middle of the day with a water jar is offered the entire thing standing where she is.

You have been offered this in your own doorway, because John 4 puts the offer in an ordinary place with nothing arranged, and it is the Holy Spirit Himself who makes a front room with shopping bags in it as legitimate an address as anywhere else.