Not Much Gravy, Love

The ladle is heavier than it looks, and the woman running the hatch tells him to keep it moving, because there are sixty through the door and the potatoes go cold faster than you would think.

His wife signed them both up. Tuesday nights, the church hall two streets over, a hot meal for anybody who wants one, and he said yes the way you say yes to a thing that is a month away. Now it is the Tuesday and he is behind the hatch in an apron that says KITCHEN in felt letters, with a tray of mash on his left and a tray of stew on his right, and the line starts at the hall doors and bends around the tea urn. His wife is on the far end doing puddings. Somebody's little boy is carrying two trays at once with his tongue out. A man in a wet coat is telling the woman behind him a long story about a bus, and she is laughing at the right places, and the radio in the kitchen is on a station nobody chose.

He is good at this sort of thing. He used to be. He can do the ladle, plate, next, ladle, plate, next, and he does it, and the line moves, and it is somewhere around the twentieth plate that he notices the thing he does not want to notice. He is not looking at anybody. He is looking at a row. Faces are coming past the hatch the way faces come past on a screen, quick, sorted, filed, gone, and his hand is doing the stew and his eyes are doing something they have been doing for a long time now without asking him. Sorting people into pictures. He could not tell you the color of the eyes of the last ten people he handed a plate to.

"I'm Iris, love. Not much gravy."

She is small and old, with a tartan shopping trolley parked against her hip and a hat with a brooch on it, and she is standing at his hatch waiting for him to look at her, because you cannot answer a person about gravy without looking at them. So he does. The whole face. It costs him something. He did not know it would. He puts less gravy on, and she says "That's the one," and moves on to his wife's puddings, and he stands there with the ladle dripping, having looked at one whole human being for the first time in longer than he can measure, and having found it hard.

And you know that hatch. Somewhere along the way you stopped seeing people and started seeing images of them, and nobody handed you a form to sign when it happened. Faces started arriving sorted. And tonight, or this week, somebody stood still in front of you and waited to be looked at, and it cost you, and you did not know it would.

You are not a man with broken eyes. It is written that God formed the eye, and He called what He made good, so what has happened since is a wound to a gift rather than a verdict on the one carrying it, and the Holy Spirit is in this hall and is not embarrassed to be here.

The man who saw people as trees

Let me say what is not going to happen in this room, because you have probably braced for it. Nobody is going to describe anything. Nobody is going to tell you your eyes are the enemy. Your eyes were made by God on purpose and He called what He made good, and the fact that they have been trained to sort people is a wound to your sight and not a verdict on your face. His written word says He formed the eye, and the Holy Spirit is not ashamed to be in the same room as a man with a dripping ladle who has just found looking hard.

Now come to a village called Bethsaida, where some people bring Jesus a blind man and beg Him to touch him. Watch what He does first. He takes the man by the hand and leads him out of the village, away from the crowd. Then He touches his eyes and asks a question that only a gentle person asks: do you see anything?

And he looked up and said, "I see people, but they look like trees, walking." Then Jesus laid his hands on his eyes again, and he opened his eyes, his sight was restored, and he saw everything clearly.Mark 8:24-25

I see people, but they look like trees, walking. Sit inside that sentence for a moment, because it is yours. He could see. That was not the problem. He could see shapes, movement, height, a row of things going past. What he could not see was a person as a person. Faces were trunks. People were things that moved. And here is the part that I want to put into your hands as carefully as I can: Jesus did not send him away for that. He did not say you should be able to see by now. He put His hands on the man's eyes again.

You are not being handed a rule about your eyes tonight; you are being handed your eyes. The written word says the man's sight was restored, and restored means it was his to begin with and it is being given back, and the Holy Spirit is the second touch, the one that turns a row of trees into Iris with a brooch on her hat.

Do you see this woman

There is another moment where Jesus hands somebody back their sight of a person, and the somebody is not blind. He is at dinner at a religious man's house, and a woman comes in whom the whole room has already sorted and filed and put in a category, and she weeps at His feet, and the host thinks his thought about her. And Jesus turns to him and says: Simon, do you see this woman? (Luke 7:44). Not do you see what she is. Do you see her. He then describes her, and everything He describes is a thing she did with her hands and her tears and her hair, a person doing things, and by the end of the sentence the category has gone and there is a woman in the room.

That is what He is doing at your hatch. Every person in that line is somebody He made and knows by name, and He is turning to you, kindly, the way He turned to Simon, and asking whether you see them. Not whether you can stop something. Whether you can see Iris.

And you have been given the sight to. Not by trying harder; by being touched twice. Scripture says God saw Hagar in a wilderness when she was a person somebody else had used, and she called Him the God who sees me (Genesis 16:13), and the same Spirit who saw her is in you, teaching your eyes the old work again. One face at a time. That is how the man at Bethsaida got the village back: he looked intently, the text says, and everything came clear.

What one face costs

I want to be honest about why it was hard, because if I pretend it is easy you will think you have failed when it is not. Looking at a whole person costs something because a whole person makes a claim on you. A picture does not. A picture asks nothing back. Iris asked for less gravy, and to be answered, and to have a man look at her while he did it, and that is a small weight and it is real, and your eyes have been trained for a long time to put weights down before they land. So of course it cost. It is supposed to. The cost is the sight coming back.

You have that sight, and I am not speaking my own opinion over you. It is written that we were made in the image of God, every one of us in that line, and an image of God cannot be sorted into a row without something in you going blind to it; and the Holy Spirit is the one who is opening what went blind, gently, and He is not on a timetable and He is not keeping a score.

And if the room you are in tonight is heavier than a page can hold, find a real person, tonight, and let them sit with you. Not to fix anything. To be one face you can look at.