One Thing Is Needful

Somebody said a thing to her at the church supper and it has not left her alone since October.

It was not aimed at her. It was a young woman, twenty-five at the most, new, standing by the urn, talking about how she was learning to just be with God. And she said that phrase, just be with Him, in the easy way that generation says things, and she went off to find her coat.

And the woman by the urn, who is seventy-one, and who has done the flowers for thirty-one years, and the funeral teas, and the visiting schedule, and the Sunday school when there was a Sunday school, and the accounts for a while in the nineties when nobody else would, stood there holding a dish towel and understood that she did not know what the young woman meant.

Not disagreed with it. Did not know what it meant. Could not have described it if somebody had asked her to.

Forty-odd years of doing things for God and she has never once sat down in front of Him with nothing in her hands.

And underneath that, the thing that keeps her awake: if the sitting is the real part, then what were the forty years.

If you are standing by an urn with a dish towel, come and sit down. The forty years are safe here.

He does not say her work was wrong

Everybody knows this story and most of us have been taught it in a way that would frighten a woman who has done the funeral teas for thirty years, so let us go slowly.

Two sisters. One is serving, which in that culture means real physical work for a house full of guests and is not a small thing. The other is sitting on the floor listening. The one who is working comes out and asks a fair question, and she asks it of Jesus rather than her sister, which tells you how tired she is.

But one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.Luke 10:42

Now read what He does not say. He does not say the serving was worthless. He does not say she should not have cooked. He does not say the guests should have gone hungry so that everyone could sit on the floor, which is what the sermon version quietly implies and which is nonsense.

What He names is not the work. It is the cumbered about, in the previous verse, and the being careful and troubled about many things. It is what the work had done to her, not the work itself.

And then He says the tender thing, which is the part I want you to have: which shall not be taken away from her. He is protecting Mary from being pulled up off the floor. He is not scolding Martha for being on her feet.

You are not being told the forty years were a mistake, and they were not a mistake. Luke 10:42 is where that sits, in a sentence whose whole second half is about something being protected rather than something being condemned, and the same Spirit who moved Luke to keep that clause is the one who lets a seventy-one year old woman hear it without flinching.

The one thing is not a better activity, it is a Person

Here is what the young woman by the urn meant, said in older language, because she is right and she has not got the vocabulary yet to explain it to somebody with thirty-one years of flowers behind them.

Mary was not doing a superior spiritual activity. She was in company. She was with a Person she loved who was in the house, and everything else in the room had become less interesting than that, and so she sat on the floor.

The one thing needful is not sitting. Sitting is just what being with somebody looks like when you stop moving.

And that is why forty years of service can run alongside it perfectly well, and in most faithful lives it does. What cannot happen is the service standing in for it. A woman can be near God constantly and never once be with Him, in the way you can live in a house with somebody for years and speak to them only about the arrangements.

You have a Person to sit with, and He has been in the house the entire forty years. He promised it, in the words about standing at the door and knocking and coming in to eat with anybody who opens (Revelation 3:20), and His Spirit does not treat a lifetime of arrangements as a barrier to company.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before another line, this outranks everything above it.

Some people must not go without food. If you live with diabetes, if you are pregnant or nursing, if you take medication, if you have ever had a hard relationship with food or with eating, if you are underweight, unwell, frail or elderly, or if you are simply not sure, speak to your doctor before you go without anything and let their answer be the answer. There is no length on this page, no kind of fast, no plan and no schedule, and there never will be one here.

And I want to say plainly to a woman of seventy-one: the whole of this article works for somebody who eats three meals a day and always will. The time we are talking about is whatever time you can free, and freeing it does not have to involve your body at all.

Privacy is about audience and never about hiding, too. Telling your doctor is right. Telling your family is right. Telling whoever cooks in your house is right and it is plain sense. None of it fails anything.

You are fully inside all of this, and you were never at the edge of it because of your age or your health. That is 2 Corinthians 8:12, not my kindness to you, and His Spirit has never once been given out according to what anybody is able for.

If today is heavier than a page can hold, call somebody real: your doctor, a counselor, or a crisis line, and the emergency services if you or anybody near you is in danger tonight.