The Gift I Have Been Polishing

There is a thing in her front room in a cabinet with glass doors and she takes it out twice a year and cleans it.

It belonged to her grandmother. It is not enormously valuable and she is not sentimental about the money. She takes it out in the spring and at Christmas, and she washes it carefully in the sink with the good cloth, and she dries it, and she puts it back.

It never once had anything in it.

Not in her time and, as far as she knows, not in her mother's either. It has been kept nice for about seventy years by three women in a row, and it has held nothing, ever, because using it might damage it.

Now, I did not start there for the sake of a picture. I started there because she told me about it herself, on a porch, and then she went quiet for a bit and said something that I have thought about ever since.

She said: I have got about four of those and only one of them is china.

She is seventy-three. She has something she has known about since she was in her twenties. She has never used it. She has read about it, prayed about it, been prayed for about it more than once, and kept it beautifully.

Fifty years of taking a thing out, cleaning it, and putting it back.

So let me ask you.

What have you been keeping nice instead of using?

Peter uses the word for a servant who spends somebody else's money

There is one verse in Peter that settles this and it does it in a single sentence, and the whole weight of it is in one noun.

Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God's grace in its various forms.1 Peter 4:10

Stewards.

Now, in the world Peter was writing in, a steward was a specific job with a specific description, and it was not a caretaker. A caretaker keeps a thing safe. A steward runs a household on somebody else's behalf, which means a steward's whole function is to spend what is not his, in the way the owner would want it spent.

A steward who preserved everything and distributed nothing would be sacked. Not praised for care. Sacked, because he had not done the job.

And Peter puts that word next to the instruction, and the instruction is use.

Now look at the second half: God's grace in its various forms. The word behind it is one that means many-colored. Grace comes in a great many shades and no two people are carrying the same shade, which is precisely why the thing you have cannot be got somewhere else if you do not spend it.

Hear where you stand, and I will say it as plainly as we say things on a porch.

You are not a woman who has been protecting something precious. Scripture calls the one who has received a steward and tells her to use it in order to serve, and the Spirit has never once given anybody a thing to keep in a cabinet.

And I want to say the tender part, because I know what has actually been going on for fifty years and it is not stinginess.

You have been afraid of getting it wrong.

That is the whole of it, is it not. Not selfishness. Not laziness. A conviction, formed a long time ago and never examined since, that a thing like this could be damaged by clumsy handling, and that it would be better to have kept it whole than to have chipped it.

But china chips and grace does not. That is the difference nobody told you. The word says grace comes in various forms and the steward is to spend it, and there is no verse anywhere about a gift that gets used up or broken by being handled badly.

Fifty years of care, and the thing it needed was not care.

And you are not a woman who has been protecting something precious. A steward in that world was not a caretaker at all: 1 Peter 4 uses the word for a servant who spends what belongs to somebody else, and one who preserved everything and handed out nothing would have been dismissed rather than praised, and the Spirit has never given anybody a thing to keep in a cabinet.