Snapping Beans on the Porch

Thursday afternoon, the good chair, a bowl in her lap and a paper sack of beans on the floor beside her, and the light coming across the boards the way it does about four o'clock.

This is the hour. She has other good hours but this is the one she would keep if somebody made her pick. There is nothing to it. Snap the ends, break them in two, drop them in the bowl, and the sound of it is one of about four sounds in this world that she would call perfect. The dog is asleep in the warm patch. Nobody wants anything from her until supper.

And then something surfaces.

We are not going to describe it and I am not going to ask you what yours is. It surfaces. Nothing brought it on. She was not thinking about anything, which is most of the point of the hour, and it arrived the way these things arrive, which is sideways and whole and from nowhere, on a Thursday, on her own porch, with a bowl of beans in her lap.

Her hands stop. And the thing she concludes, sitting there, is not about the arrival at all.

She concludes: then there is nowhere.

That is the whole of it. Not shame, not exactly. Something colder than shame. If it can get onto this porch, at four o'clock, on the best afternoon of the week, with the dog asleep and the light doing what it does, then there is no room in her life that it cannot get into, and there never was, and every quiet hour she has had for years has only been an hour it did not happen to come.

She is sixty-six years old and she finishes the beans, because you do not leave beans half done. And the hour is gone and she cannot get it back and she does not tell anybody.

And you know that porch. Something arrives that you did not choose and cannot get out, and the arrival is bad, and then you draw a conclusion from where it happened, and the conclusion takes something away from you that the arrival never could.

So take this in before we go one step further, because I think you have braced for the cold version. You are not somebody with nowhere left, and that porch was not taken from you. Psalm 139:8 says that if you make your bed in the lowest place He is there, and it is said as a plain fact about His whereabouts rather than as a comfort somebody is offering, and the Holy Spirit is on these boards with you and is not embarrassed to be here.

In the middle of them, not after

There is a line in the Psalms that says something so ordinary about the inside of a person that people read past it, and everything in this article is sitting in it.

In the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul.Psalm 94:19

Read where the comfort is located. It is not after the multitude. It is not once the multitude has been dealt with, sorted, resolved, or repented of. It is in the multitude. The Hebrew behind it is a crowded word, a word for a swarm, a jostling. He is describing exactly what you know: a great many things going on inside a person at once, uninvited and not in an order anybody chose.

And in the middle of that, he says, Your comforts delight my soul.

The man writing that did not get his head cleared first. He is not reporting a quiet mind. He is reporting company in a crowded one, which is an entirely different thing and a far more useful one, because a quiet mind cannot be arranged on demand and company can arrive anywhere.

You are not alone in there, and it was never going to require an empty room. The written word puts the comfort inside the crowd rather than on the far side of it, which means the arrival on your porch did not evict anything; and the Holy Spirit is the one who is already present in the swarm, on a Thursday, at four o'clock, with the beans half done.

And look at the word delight. It is not endure. It is not tolerate. Something in that verse is genuinely pleasant and it is happening in the middle of a jostling crowd of thoughts, which is a claim so unlike what most people expect that it is worth sitting with a while.

Why the conclusion costs more than the arrival

I want to be honest about which part of this actually took your afternoon, because if the two stay welded together you will keep losing hours you did not have to lose.

The arrival cost you about a second. You had no vote in it, and neither does anybody else alive, and a mind produces material continuously without consulting the person who owns it. That is not a spiritual condition. That is a description of how a mind works, and it is true of the calmest and most saintly person you know.

The conclusion cost you the afternoon and then some. Then there is nowhere. That sentence is not a report about what happened, it is a piece of reasoning that got done in about two seconds, and it took a good porch away from a woman who had earned it.

You were not weak to draw it, and it arrived at the speed of an instinct. Psalm 34:18 says the Lord is near to them that are of a broken heart, and it is a statement about where He already stands rather than an offer waiting to be taken up; His Spirit does that standing near at whatever pace He keeps, and He is not measuring how fast you come round to it.

And there is a second half that deserves plain speech. The reason the conclusion goes in so easily is that it sounds like the mature view. It sounds like a woman who is not fooling herself. Grim reasoning wears the clothes of wisdom, particularly for somebody who was raised not to make a fuss, and there has never been a moment when it presented itself as something you could decline.

You are not being asked to pretend anything, and nobody is telling you to be sunny about it. Psalm 103:14 says He knows our frame and remembers that we are dust, which is a verse about a God who has never expected a person to be sturdier than He made them; the same Spirit doing that remembering is the one who kept you in that chair until the beans were finished.

And if what runs under those quiet hours is heavier than a page can hold, do not carry it alone. Find a real person this week, one who can sit with you without needing to fix a thing, and let them be somebody you do not have to be finished in front of.

The porch was never the protection

Here is what I want to hand you, and it is the opposite of what the conclusion said.

You had been treating the porch as a safe room. Four o'clock, the good chair, the bowl, the sound. And the reasoning went: it got into the safe room, therefore there is no safe room.

But the porch was never what was keeping you. It was a good hour and it was a gift and it was not a defense. What has actually been keeping you, through every quiet hour and every loud one, is somebody who was already inside the crowd before anything surfaced, and who is described in that psalm as being pleasant company in exactly the conditions you experienced on Thursday.

Which means nothing was breached. A gift was interrupted. Those are different sizes of event and you have been paying for the larger one.

You are held by something that was already inside, and it did not have to be let in. Scripture says in the multitude of my thoughts within me thy comforts delight my soul, and the preposition is the whole verse; the Holy Spirit is the one who was on that porch before the bowl was ever filled.

So the porch is not lost. It is a good chair and a paper sack of beans and a light that does that at four o'clock, and it will be there again on Thursday. And something surfaced there once and did not take it.