She Did What She Could, And He Said So Out Loud

The table is laid for nine and there are six chairs plus the piano stool plus two brought in from the hall, and everybody is arriving at once, which is the good part.

The room is bright because it faces the wrong way for the afternoon and the right way for the evening.

She is forty.

Six people offered to bring something and she said yes to four of them, which took a conversation with herself in the shower this morning that lasted the whole shower.

Because here is what she used to do. She used to do all of it. Nine people, one of her, everything from scratch, out the night before for the fish, up at six, and it was not a performance, it was just what she did and she was very good at it and she loved it.

Now she does roughly a fifth. She has learned what a fifth is. She knows exactly which fifth is worth doing and which four fifths she can let go of and who to ask.

And she stands in the doorway while everybody comes in, and does the thing she does every single time, which is measure this against that. The version of her that did all of it is standing in the room too, and that woman is better than her, and there is no evening in her life now that is not being graded against a person who no longer exists.

If you have that other version of you at your own table, you know she never says anything, and you know she does not have to.

He praised the limit, deliberately

Weigh it first and at its own size, because on this site the honest paragraph comes before the good one and it is never trimmed to arrive at it.

What this costs is not the cooking. It is the grading. It costs you every occasion, permanently, because there is no evening you host that is not being compared to one you used to host. It costs the shower conversation, which happens before everything now. It costs the four fifths, which you were good at and which you loved and which are simply gone. And it costs you a version of yourself who stands in the room being better than you, silently, at every gathering you will ever have.

I am not calling that small and I am not putting it beside anybody else's, because on this site there is no ranking of what people carry and there never will be. Any word from God that needs your capacity made lighter first is not one Scripture speaks and not one the Holy Spirit has ever carried.

And plainly, before anything else: if the grading has gone somewhere darker, as far as thinking the nine of them would have a better evening with somebody else in the doorway, tell one living person today. Your doctor, one of the four who offered to bring something, or a crisis line where you live, 988 by call or text in the United States and its equivalent wherever you are. Scripture asks nobody to hold that alone, and the Holy Spirit has always moved through people who say yes when somebody offers.

Now, Mark 14, and this is a scene about somebody being criticized in public.

A woman comes in with an alabaster box of ointment and pours it out on His head. The room objects. It is wasteful, they say, and they say it to her face, and Mark records that they murmured against her.

And Jesus stops it.

She hath done what she could: she is come aforehand to anoint my body to the burying. Verily I say unto you, Wheresoever this gospel shall be preached throughout the whole world, this also that she hath done shall be spoken of for a memorial of her.Mark 14:8-9

She hath done what she could.

Sit with what an odd thing that is to say in her defense. He could have said the gift was magnificent, and it was. He could have said the ointment was worth a year's wages, and it was. He could have praised the extravagance, which is what the room was arguing about.

He praises the limit. He says she did what she could, which is a sentence about capacity, and He makes it the whole verdict.

You are being measured by a sentence that has a ceiling built into it. Mark 14:8 says she did what she could and stops there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a scene from a room in Bethany and lays it on a doorway with nine people arriving.

Now, what He does with it next, because He does not leave it as a defense. He says it will be spoken of wherever the gospel goes, as a memorial of her.

He takes the sentence about her limit and makes it the permanent record.

You have a limit that God turned into a memorial rather than a footnote. That is written into Mark 14:9, and His Spirit in you is the one who makes an old defense land on a woman in a doorway.

Now let me be exact about what this does not say, because a great deal of encouraging conversation has already happened around that table.

It does not say the fifth is secretly as good as the whole. It is not. You know what you used to do and it was more, and I am not going to lie to you in your own kitchen. And it does not promise you the four fifths back, and I am not going to predict your capacity, because what God does there is His, in His own way.

And I am not going to find you a hidden achievement in the fifth, either. That would be the same grading with a kinder mark at the bottom, and the machine would still be running.

You were never being measured against a woman who does not exist. Scripture has Jesus praising the limit itself, and the same Spirit who inspired the account is the one who carries it into a bright room at the right time of day.