Naming One Good Thing

Ask her how her week has been and you will get a complete and accurate report in about nine seconds.

The van. The letter from the surgery. The thing with the neighbor's fence that has been going on since February and is not, if she is honest, entirely the neighbor's fault. She is not a moaner. Every one of those is a real item and she reports them the way a woman reports the weather, without any self-pity in it at all.

Now ask her for a good thing.

Watch what happens. She will find one. She is not a miserable woman and there are good things. And then, before the sentence has finished, she will do the thing she has done all her life, which is add something to the end of it.

The tomatoes have come on well, but they will be over in a fortnight.

Her granddaughter rang, which was lovely, though I expect she wanted something.

The weather has been beautiful, and we will pay for it later.

Every good thing gets a tail on it. Every one. And nobody has ever pointed it out to her, because it sounds like realism and half the county talks that way, and because a woman who does that is usually the most reliable person in any room and nobody wants to poke at her.

Where good things come from, and what that settles

There is a verse that says one plain thing about the origin of good, and once you see it, the tail on the end of your sentences becomes a great deal harder to attach.

Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning (James 1:17).

Two halves. The first says where good comes from: down, from Him. The second says something about His character: no variableness, no shadow of turning. He does not go off. He is not moody. He is not building up to something.

Which means the tomatoes coming on well was a gift that came down from a Father who has no shadow of turning in Him at all, and the fortnight it lasts is not the catch, and there is no catch, because there is nothing in Him that catches.

You have been given good things by a Father who has no turn in Him. That is what the word actually says, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a verse like that past a habit fifty years old, because Scripture calls Him the one who leads us into truth rather than into a better attitude.

The tail is not realism. It is a brace.

Now let me name what the qualifier is doing, because you have always called it being sensible.

The tail is protective. If you name a good thing and stop, you are exposed, because you have said a thing that could be taken away and you would then look foolish for having enjoyed it. If you name it and add the tail, you have already accounted for the loss, and nothing can catch you out.

That is not realism. That is a woman refusing to be caught out twice, and it works, and it costs her every single good thing she has ever had.

I am not going to scold you for it. Somebody taught you that, probably not on purpose, and it kept you upright through years that would have flattened other people.

You are safe enough to say a good thing and stop. The word says God gives us richly all things to enjoy (1 Timothy 6:17), and enjoy is His word and not a soft one, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a person able to hold something good without bracing, which is a work He does slowly and never by force.

What a blessing does that gratitude does not

There is a difference between being grateful and blessing God, and this is the place it matters.

Gratitude is an inward state. It can sit in a woman for a lifetime and never once come out of her mouth, and yours has.

Blessing God is a sentence. It is out loud, it is addressed to Him, it names something He did, and it ends. And the ending is the part that does the work in a woman like you, because a sentence with a full stop on it cannot have a tail.

You have a mouth that can say one true good thing and then stop. Scripture calls it the fruit of our lips giving thanks to His name (Hebrews 13:15), which is a thing done with a mouth rather than felt in a chest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary sentence into worship.

And I will be plain, because you have no time for anything else. Saying it does not mean nothing will be taken. Things will be taken; you have lived long enough to know that and so have I. What is settled is that the good was good and came down from a Father who does not turn, and a woman who can say that without a tail has a different sort of week even when the week is the same.