The Chipped Cup on the Top Shelf

Fourth call of the morning and it is twenty past ten and Sylvie's hands have started.

They start about now, most days. It is not dramatic and it is not new and she is forty-seven and it is what happens to hands that do this work: the base of both thumbs, the two smallest fingers on the right, a general stiffness that is worse in the winter and never entirely gone in the summer.

She has fourteen calls today and she is fine.

Mr Adebayo is eighty-eight and this is a thirty minute call, which in practice means about forty because he talks and she does not have it in her to walk out mid-sentence. He is dressed. He is sitting in the chair by the window with the paper he cannot really see any more folded on his knee for the look of the thing.

She makes the tea, which is the shape of the call: she makes it, he supervises, and they both pretend she does not know how he takes it.

And in that cupboard, on the top shelf, at the back, is a chipped cup.

The rest of the shelf is six good ones. Matching, unmarked, from a set. She has to reach past all six of them every single morning to get to the one at the back, which has a chip out of the rim about the size of a fingernail and a hairline running down from it, and which he asks for by name every day.

She has never asked why. It is the sort of thing you do not ask. People have their ways and you do not investigate them, you just reach past six good cups.

Today her hands are bad enough that she is slow at the shelf, and he watches her be slow, and he says: my wife's.

That is all he says at first. Then, after a while: forty-one years. She dropped it in nineteen eighty-two and she cried and I said we will keep it, and she said what for, and I said for this.

Sylvie stands at the counter with a chipped cup in two aching hands.

And here is what is going on in her, and it is not about a cup at all.

Sylvie has a settled belief about herself and God, and it is this: He uses people. She has seen Him use people. And the people He uses have something about them, some capacity, some quality of vessel, and she is not one of them and never has been. What she is, is willing, and He puts up with her, and that is fine and she does not complain about it and she has never once said it out loud to another human being.

You have that belief. Yours might be worded differently. But you know the difference you have drawn between the ones He uses and the one He puts up with, and you know which side of it you have put yourself on.

Paul says the container is cheap on purpose

Second Corinthians is the letter where Paul is most honest about being worn out, and in the middle of it he says the thing about vessels, and the second half of the verse is the half nobody reads.

But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.2 Corinthians 4:7

Earthen vessels. Not the good pottery. The word means the cheap fired clay containers that everybody had and nobody valued, the ones you kept oil and grain in, the ones that got chipped and cracked and stayed in use anyway because they were not worth replacing.

You are an earthen vessel, and that is what Scripture calls the container the treasure is kept in. That is the written word and not my comfort at a kitchen counter, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from a hard letter and lays it in a front room at twenty past ten.

Now the second half, which is the whole argument. That the excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us.

That is a purpose clause. It tells you why the container is what it is.

The ordinariness of the pot is not a compromise God made because better pots were unavailable. It is the design. It is chosen, on purpose, so that when something happens through you, nobody in the room can possibly attribute it to the pot.

Read your own belief against that sentence. You have thought: He uses the good vessels, and puts up with me. Paul says: there is no such thing as a good vessel in this operation, and the reason there is no such thing is so that the power is visibly His.

He names the body twice as where it shows

Keep reading, because the next few verses get very physical and they are describing you at twenty past ten.

Troubled on every side, yet not distressed; perplexed, but not in despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; cast down, but not destroyed.

And then this: always bearing about in the body the dying of the Lord Jesus, that the life also of Jesus might be made manifest in our body.

In the body. Twice, in one sentence.

Paul does not say the life of Jesus is made manifest in our teaching, or in our results, or in our capacity. He says in our body, which for you today is two aching hands reaching past six good cups for the one at the back.

You are carrying this in a body, and it is already the place He said it shows. Second Corinthians 4 says in our body twice in a single verse, and the same Spirit who kept Paul upright through everything in that chapter is the one making it a present fact in a woman with fourteen calls left.

Let me guard this, because there is a bad version of it that gets said to people in your job and I have heard it said.

I am not telling you the ache is a gift, and I am not telling you to be glad about your hands. It is a real thing happening in a real body and it will not be improved by anybody putting a bow on it. Paul says troubled and perplexed and cast down and he does not tidy any of those away either.

And I am not telling you that your capacity does not matter or that you should stop looking after those hands. That would be a foolish thing to say to somebody with fourteen calls and a shift on Saturday.

What I am telling you is the purpose clause. The excellency of the power may be of God, and not of us. The vessel was never the qualification. There is no shelf in that verse where the good cups are kept for the important work, and there never has been.