The Kitchen She Cannot Go Back To

It happened in the baking aisle of a grocery store in the next county over, which is a mercy, because nobody there knows her.

Ruthie was reaching for a bag of flour and somebody two carts down had a child with them and the child was eating an orange, and the smell of the peel came across at the exact same time as somebody opened a case of something with cinnamon in it, and Ruthie stopped dead with her hand out and stood there for what she thinks was about a minute.

Her grandmother's kitchen smelled like that in December. Orange peel and cinnamon and coffee and the woodstove.

That house is on a road eleven miles from where Ruthie lives now, and it is standing, and other people are in it, and Ruthie cannot go there. The reason is a fight over the will and a set of decisions her uncle made and a door that got closed in a way that has never been reopened. She was right in that fight. Everybody who knows the details would say she was right. Being right cost her the house, and the house is where her grandmother was, and her grandmother has been dead six years.

She left the flour. She went home without it and made something else.

Here is the evening it caught.

Her husband said, at supper, "Did you get the flour?"

And Ruthie said, "They were out."

And he said, "Huh," and that was the whole conversation, and she has thought about the fact that she lied to him about flour every day since.

You know that. Something goes through you in a public place with no warning, from a house or a room you cannot get back to, and you handle it and you go home and you say nothing, and the not saying is a weight of its own.

The water comes from the passing

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to call your uncle. I am not going to tell you not to. I do not know that family and I would be a fool to hand a woman instructions about her own people from behind a screen. I am not going to tell you the door will open.

What I will do is show you one verse in a psalm about pilgrimage, and I want you to notice which way the water goes.

Blessed is the man whose strength is in thee; in whose heart are the ways of them. Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well; the rain also filleth the pools.Psalm 84:5-6

Baca is a word for weeping. It is also the name of a tree that seeps. The valley of Baca is the low, dry, hard part of the road up to Jerusalem, the stretch that pilgrims had to cross to get where they were going, and the psalm calls it by a name that means tears.

And here is the thing everybody reads too fast. Who passing through the valley of Baca make it a well.

The travelers make it a well.

Not: God removes the valley. Not: they get around it. They pass through, and in the passing the dry place becomes a place with water in it, and the next people who come along find the well already dug.

You are making water in a dry stretch by walking through it rather than by getting past it, and Psalm 84 puts the well in the passing itself. Psalm 84:6 has them making it a well as they go, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a grocery aisle in the next county.

And then the second half of the verse, which keeps it from being about human effort. The rain also filleth the pools. They dig; God fills. Neither half works alone and the psalm does not choose between them.

You have not been digging without anything coming, and the verse puts the rain and the digging in the same sentence. It is written that they make it a well and the rain fills the pools, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an ancient cooperation a present provision.

The ache is not a summons

Now let me be careful, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

When something like the smell of orange peel goes through a person, a certain kind of preaching will call it a prompting. It will suggest that God is stirring something, that the ache is a call, that Ruthie should go and knock on that door.

I am not doing that. I do not know whether she should go to that house and neither does anybody else reading this, and turning a smell in a grocery store into a divine instruction is exactly how people get hurt.

An ache is not a summons. It is an ache. It is what a body does when a memory arrives without permission.

You are not receiving instructions when a memory goes through you, and Scripture never once treats a rush of feeling as a directive. Psalm 84:6 describes people crossing a valley rather than being redirected by it, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a real grief from being misread as a command.

And here is what I do want to name, because it is the heavier thing. It is not the aisle. It is the flour.

Ruthie lied to her husband about a bag of flour, and it was a tiny lie, and it cost her more than the minute in the store did. Because the lie put the thing outside the house. It made the grief a private matter in a marriage where it did not need to be one.

You have not been protecting anybody by carrying it alone, and Scripture never treats an honest grief as a burden on the people who love you. Galatians 6:2 tells people to bear one another's burdens as an ordinary instruction, and the Holy Spirit is what makes handing over a weight a normal thing rather than an imposition.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the grief for that house has gone somewhere heavier than sad, or if the small lies have started to add up into something that sits on your chest, do not carry that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your husband, a friend, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your uncle. That is me refusing to leave you in that aisle by yourself.