All The Serving You Thought Was Currency

She has a key to that building, and she has had one for fifteen years, and she has never once used it to let herself in for her own sake.

She is there before anybody. She is there after everybody. She has run the kitchen, the rota, the flowers, the two funerals nobody could face organizing, the whole of one summer when the pastor was unwell and nobody said out loud who was actually holding the thing together.

And she loves it. That has to be said first, because otherwise this reads as a complaint and it is not one. She loves that church. She would do it all again.

But something has been growing underneath it, and she noticed it properly at the harvest supper, watching a young couple who have been there eighteen months get prayed over from the front for a thing that has just gone right for them.

What she felt was not joy, and she has been sick about it ever since.

There is a total in her. She has never written it down and she would be mortified if anybody saw it. Fifteen years, one key, two funerals, one summer, and the thing she has asked God for since before any of it started, still exactly where it was.

She has prayed about it. Plenty. In the kitchen with her hands in the sink. In the car park. She prays properly, she is not a woman who has ever been shy with God.

And a woman she loves said, after the supper: sis, have you fasted for it?

She said she would. She has thought of little else. And what came up in her, wiping down a counter, was not hope. It was arithmetic. Here was another entry.

If there is a total in you that you would be ashamed to read out, come here and sit down. Somebody else is doing the counter tonight.

The resentment is not the sin you think it is

Let us take the frightening part first, because it is sitting on your chest and nothing else will go in until it moves.

What you felt at the harvest supper is what a person feels when they have been operating an arrangement that God never entered into. It is the ache of a bill presented at a counter with nobody behind it. It is not proof that you never loved that church, and it is not evidence that fifteen years were fake.

You are not a hypocrite and you were never disqualified by a feeling in a hall. That is not softness offered to a woman with a cloth in her hand. It is written that the Lord looketh on the heart (1 Samuel 16:7), and the Holy Spirit has been reading yours through every one of those funerals and has never once met it with anything but tenderness.

What the whole thing began in

There is a question Paul asks a church that had started well and drifted into accounting, and he asks it as a question because a question makes a person answer.

Having begun in the Spirit, are ye now made perfect by the flesh?Galatians 3:3

Hear what he grants them before he asks it. They had begun in the Spirit. That was real. Nobody is saying the beginning was a fraud.

The drift he names is the one every serious, capable, dependable person drifts into: the thing began as gift and has quietly turned into performance, and nobody notices the day it changes because the outward work looks identical. The rota looks the same. The key looks the same. What has changed is what the person believes the work is buying.

You are still standing in what you began in, and it is still a gift. I am not saying it to spare a faithful woman a hard evening: it is precisely what the question assumes about them (Galatians 3:3), and it is His Spirit, not this paragraph, who takes it from a verse you could teach into something that changes what a Saturday in that kitchen feels like.

Then what is fasting, if it is not an entry

Here is the honest answer, and it is much smaller than what came up at the counter.

Fasting is not a payment. It is not a credit, not a line in a column and not the entry that finally tips a total. It is the body brought into a prayer that was already being prayed. It is the whole of a person, including the part that gets hungry and tired and is there before everybody, turning toward God with empty hands.

And the trap for a woman like you is obvious, so let it be named. Do not let it become the newest entry. Somebody keeping a total will file anything: sincerity, effort, feeling it hard enough, a purer motive, a better attitude at harvest supper. You are not asked for any of it, and none of it was ever the currency. Scripture says not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us (Titus 3:5), and it is His Spirit who makes that a weight leaving your chest rather than a doctrine you could preach.

Now something said out in the open here and not in fine print. Some people must not go without food at all, and being one of them takes nothing away from you. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with eating, if you are underweight, unwell or simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything, and let their answer be the answer. And a woman running a building on four hours and other people's crises needs feeding, not one more thing taken off her. You are not one step further from God because of a doctor's instruction. Scripture says the Lord is good to all, and his tender mercies are over all his works (Psalm 145:9), and the Holy Spirit has never once arrived in a smaller measure to anybody on account of a body.

And if this week has more in it than a page can carry, if you are frightened for yourself, put this down and ring somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anyone near you is in danger tonight. That is not a road around God. That is help He put in the world on purpose.