The Word That Will Not Cover Her Mother

Her mother's kitchen has one drawer that has never opened smoothly in thirty years and everybody in the family knows the trick with the hip.

It is Tuesday and there is rain on the window over the sink, the soft kind that goes all evening. The same pot is on the stove, the heavy one with the dented lid. The wooden spoon is burnt black on one side from a night in 1998 nobody talks about. The refrigerator has a magnet from a dentist who retired, a school photo of a cousin, and a coupon four years expired. Her mother is at the stove with her back to her, doing the thing she does with her wrist that has never once been taught to anyone successfully.

She is drying dishes with a towel that is older than she is.

This morning she was in a study in a bright room with good coffee and women she genuinely loves, and they were doing testimonies, and there was a shape to it. Before, and after. And the word for the before was darkness. I came out of darkness. Everybody said amen, warmly, and one woman cried, and it was real, and she said amen too.

Then she drove here.

And the word is in her hands like a coat that will not go over the shoulders of the woman at the stove. Because the before was this kitchen. It was lunch bags with her name written on them in ballpoint every single school morning for twelve years. It was soup when she had the chicken pox, brought up on a tray with a folded paper towel under the spoon. It was a woman standing in that doorway at 6:40 in the morning in a bathrobe making sure four children got out with coats on. Her mother does not believe. Has never believed, is not moved by any of it, changes the subject kindly and firmly. And her mother fed her every day of her childhood, and no one has ever been able to tell her what to do with those two facts in one sentence.

So she dries the pot lid and does not say anything, and the rain keeps going, and the drawer sticks when her mother goes for the salt, and neither of them mentions it, because you use your hip.

You know the coat that will not fit. Yours might be a father, or a grandmother, or a whole town, or a language you were sung to sleep in. And you know the exact moment in a bright room when a word went past that was supposed to cover your whole before, and how quiet you went, and how you have never told anybody in that room why.

What Scripture actually calls darkness

Come and lean on this counter with me, because I want to look at that word carefully, and careful is the only way I know to love people well.

Paul uses it in a letter to a church full of new believers, and watch what kind of noun it is.

Who hath delivered us from the power of darkness, and hath translated us into the kingdom of his dear Son.Colossians 1:13

The power of darkness. A dominion. In the next clause he calls the other side a kingdom, which tells you what he is comparing: one rule against another rule. He is describing a jurisdiction a person was under and has been carried out of. He is not describing a house, or a recipe, or a woman with a wooden spoon.

You were handed a word doing a job Scripture never gave it. Colossians 1:13 names a power and a kingdom, and the Holy Spirit who inspired that sentence chose the vocabulary of jurisdiction rather than the vocabulary of family, which means the coat does not fit because it was cut for something else entirely.

That is not me softening the Bible for you. It is me reading the noun. And I will tell you plainly what I am not going to do at this counter: I am not going to tell you where your mother stands with God. I do not know, it is not mine, and anybody who hands you a verdict on another person's soul has handed you something they were not given either. That belongs to Him.

The command has no clause in it

Now let me put the other verse in your hand, because only half of this has been in there so far.

Hearken unto thy father that begat thee, and despise not thy mother when she is old.Proverbs 23:22

Read it for the clause that is not there. It does not say if she believes. The fifth commandment does not say it either: honor thy father and thy mother, full stop, and Paul repeats it to the Ephesians without adding anything (Ephesians 6:2).

And Jesus went after people, hard, precisely for inventing an exemption. There were men who would declare a thing dedicated to God and then use that dedication as a reason not to support their own parents, and He said they were making the word of God of none effect through their tradition (Mark 7:13). The religious version of getting out of it was the one He named.

You are under a command to honor her, and it arrived without conditions attached. It is written in Proverbs 23:22 and again in Exodus 20:12, and the Spirit who preserved both is the one who kept every clause out of it that a person might have used to get free of a mother.

So the dish towel in your hand is not a compromise. It is obedience. Drying that pot is not you being soft on your before; it is you doing exactly the thing God told His people to do, in a kitchen, on a Tuesday, in the rain.

Nothing that was good in that kitchen came from nowhere

Here is the part I most want you to have.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning.James 1:17

Every good gift. Not every good gift given by believers. Every one, from above, coming down. So the lunch bag with your name on it in ballpoint was a good gift, and it came down from the Father of lights, and He routed it through a woman standing at a counter at half past six in the morning. That is not me being sentimental. That is the verse.

You have a childhood full of things that came down from God Himself, and none of it has been reclassified. James 1:17 says every good gift, and the Spirit who moved on James did not write an exception for the good things handed to a child by somebody who did not know the Giver.

Look at Paul, who had every reason to burn his own history and did not. He kept his learning, his languages, his citizenship, his knowledge of the Scriptures. He counted what he had reckoned as gain a loss for the sake of Christ, and that is a different thing from pretending it never happened; and he wrote that he could wish himself accursed for the sake of his kinsmen (Romans 9:3), which is not the sentence of a man who had filed his family under a category.

You were never asked to delete anything in order to receive what God does. His word makes a new creature and it never once instructs anyone to disown a mother, and the same Spirit who does the making is the one who wrote the command to honor her in the first place.