When You Can’t Stop Doing

A quarter to seven.

This is the busiest hour in a kitchen. Something is on the stove, something else is waiting to go in, and somebody wants to know how long until it’s ready. The chairs are all at the table and nobody is in them yet. The evening has barely started and it’s already full.

A lot of us live by a rule nobody ever wrote down. You can sit when it’s done.

Clear the counter, answer the last email, get the bills paid and the house quiet, and then you can rest. Rest is whatever is left at the end of the list. The trouble is that the list doesn’t end, so the chair stays empty.

There’s a story about two sisters and a dinner guest that takes five sentences to tell. It’s about two thousand years old, and it has been quietly arguing with that rule the whole time.

One of the sisters was named Martha. She lived with her sister, Mary, in a small village a couple of miles outside Jerusalem.

One day Jesus came through. If you’ve never read about him, he was a teacher from Galilee, the farming and fishing country in the north, and he walked from town to town talking about God. He didn’t travel alone. The story begins by saying they were on the road, and other accounts say a whole group went with him, men and women both. When he stopped at a house, they all stopped there.

The story says Martha welcomed him into her home. Her home. She was the one who opened the door, and she was the one who would have to feed whoever came through it.

It’s worth picturing what that meant. Nothing came out of a box. There was a fire to keep going, water to carry, bread to make from flour, and a room full of people who had been walking all day. Nobody was going to order out. That is not fussing. That is love with its sleeves rolled up.

Her sister Mary sat down on the floor near Jesus and listened to him. Sitting at a teacher’s feet was how a student sat in those days, and Mary had taken that place.

Martha, the story says, was distracted by all the preparations to be made.

So she went in. Notice who she went to. Not her sister. She walked past Mary and spoke to the guest.

Lord, do You not care that my sister has left me to serve alone? Tell her to help me!

If you have ever been the one in the kitchen while everyone else was in the other room, you can hear exactly how that came out.

He answered by saying her name twice. Martha, Martha.

People say a name twice when they want someone to stop moving and look at them. Then he said the rest of it: you are worried and upset about many things. But only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her.

Read Martha’s request again, because the answer is shaped exactly to it. She had asked him to send Mary back to the kitchen. In plain terms, she had asked him to take Mary’s place away from her. He said no, that place would not be taken.

But he didn’t say what a lot of people expect him to say. He didn’t tell Martha her work was wrong. He didn’t say the meal didn’t matter or send the guests away hungry. He didn’t tell her to quit cooking forever. He said she was worried and upset about many things, and that only one thing was needed.

And look at the word the translation uses for it. Portion. It’s a kitchen word. Martha was the one deciding how much of everything went on everyone’s plate that night. He told the cook there was a portion nobody would be allowed to take off a plate. It was Mary’s because Mary had chosen it. Nothing in the sentence says Martha couldn’t choose it too.

Here is what was still true when he said it.

Whatever she had been making wasn’t ready. The fire still needed tending. The room was still full of tired, hungry travelers, and they would still need to eat within the hour. Not one part of the work was finished.

He didn’t tell her she could rest once supper was served. He offered her the good portion right in the middle of the preparations, with the fire going and the guests waiting. The seat was open while the work was still undone.

Luke, who tells the story, stops right there. He never says what Martha did next.

But she turns up again in another account. Some time later her brother, Lazarus, fell sick and died. By the time Jesus got there, Lazarus had been buried four days. And Martha, being Martha, didn’t wait at the house. She went out on the road to meet him while her sister stayed home. She told him plainly that if he’d been there, her brother wouldn’t have died. Grief and faith in the same breath.

Then, standing in that road, she said one of the clearest things anyone says about him in the whole record.

I believe that You are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world.

The Christ was the one people had been promised God would send. Martha said it out loud, with her brother in a tomb, before anyone had seen a thing that would make it easy to say.

The woman from the kitchen never stopped being the one who moves first. She simply knew where to go.

What this says about peace

Peace usually gets treated as permission, handed out once the list is finished. In this story it was offered to a woman with her hands full, in the middle of the work, by the guest all the work was for. It wasn’t a reward for getting done. It was a seat, and the seat was open before anything was done.

The work is not the villain here. Martha’s work was real, and it was love. The trouble was the many things, crowding in all at once, until she was too busy to hear the guest she had opened the door for.

This week

The case you’re building. Martha didn’t go to her sister. She went past her sister to someone else and made the case there. A lot of us do that. The note to the boss about a coworker, the long phone call to a friend about a spouse or a sibling. Before you make that case to anyone else this week, go to the person it’s about and ask for one specific thing. One sentence, face to face.

The hospital room. Somebody you love is in a hospital bed, and you are the one handling it. The forms, the questions for the nurse, the calls to the family, the parking. Hours go by and you haven’t actually sat beside the bed. Next time you’re there, put the phone in your pocket, pull the chair close, and sit for ten minutes without managing anything at all.

The chair at your own table. At family meals some people never sit through a whole one. They’re up for the salt, the water, the second helping, and they eat last, standing at the counter. If that’s you, put everything on the table before you sit. Then stay in your chair until the meal is over. If someone needs more water, let them get it.

The many things. He named the problem as many things. Some evening this week, write all of yours down on a single page, everything that’s pulling at you. Then circle one, the one thing that actually has to happen tomorrow. Leave the rest on the page.