The One Who Came To Serve

She worked out something about herself in the doorway of her own kitchen at about eleven at night and she has been sitting with it since.

There were three people in that kitchen. Her son, home for a bit. Her sister. Her husband. All of them talking, all of them people she loves, all of them entirely welcome.

And she stood in the doorway with a basket of washing on her hip and realized that not one of them had noticed she had come in, and that if she said something they would all turn round and be delighted, and that the reason nobody had noticed is that she is not a person in that room. She is the thing that makes the room work.

Not because they are unkind. Every one of them would say she is the best of them and they would mean it.

But there is a shape she has been in for so long that it has stopped being a role and started being what she is, and the shape is: the one who does it. Twenty-six years of that shape.

And underneath it, the thing she has never said, which arrived fully formed in that doorway: there is nothing in this for me. Not from them, and, if she is honest, not from God either.

If you have had that thought in a doorway, come and sit down. Nobody here needs anything from you.

He describes His own job and then says what it cost

Here is the sentence, and almost everybody stops at the comma.

Even as the Son of man came not to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a ransom for many.Matthew 20:28

Came not to be ministered unto, but to minister. That is the half that gets quoted at tired women, usually with warmth and usually by people who have never been in the doorway at eleven at night.

Now read what follows it. And to give his life a ransom for many.

A ransom is a payment made to get somebody out. It is not a description of service in general, it is a specific and enormous transaction with a price attached, and the price named in the sentence is His life.

Which means the verse is not saying that serving is what a person is for and that is the end of the account. It is saying that His serving cost Him everything and that it purchased something, and the whole New Testament goes on at length about what was bought and who now has it.

He did not serve into a void. There is an outcome, and it is not His outcome, it is ours, and He talks about it constantly.

You have been serving into something rather than into nothing, and it was already purchasing something real. Matthew 20:28 is where that sits, in a sentence whose second half nobody quotes, and the same Spirit who moved Matthew to attach a price and a purpose to the serving is the one who reaches a woman standing in a doorway with a basket on her hip.

He also received, constantly, and let people see Him do it

Now the part that will be harder for her than the theology, and it is the reason the doorway thought had teeth.

The same Jesus who said that sentence was fed by women out of their own means, and Luke names three of them. He asked a stranger at a well to give Him a drink. He slept in other people's houses for three years. He let a woman pour something extremely expensive over His feet while a room full of people objected, and He defended her doing it.

He was not embarrassed about any of it. He never once deflected a kindness, and He never turned a gift into a transaction by immediately doing something back.

Which matters, because the shape she is in is not actually the shape of Christ. It is half of it. She has the giving and she has nothing whatsoever in the receiving, and a person who only gives is not more like Him, she is running on one lung.

And the reason it has gone on twenty-six years is not that they will not serve her. It is that she has become extremely good at making it impossible. The deflection is automatic now. Somebody starts and she has already taken it back off them.

You are permitted to be served, and He did it Himself, and He let people watch Him do it. He promised it, in the account of the women who ministered to Him of their substance and were named in the record for it (Luke 8:3), and His Spirit does not require a woman to be the one carrying everything.

The paragraph that outranks the teaching

Before we go on, this outranks everything above it, and it matters more than usual here.

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 is not going to be one here.

And there is nothing anywhere on this site that admires a woman for going without so that everybody else has enough. That is the oldest damage this subject does and it is not welcome here. You are already carrying a great deal, and nothing on this page is going to ask you to take one more thing off yourself.

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

You are fully inside this, and you were never at its edge because of what your body needs. Scripture settled that long before you got here (2 Corinthians 8:12), and the Spirit of God has never once been given out according to what anybody manages.

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.