The Blue Ribbon In The Empty Kitchen

For the person holding the thing they worked for, in a room with nobody in it.

You won it, and you're standing in your own kitchen with it, and there's nobody here.

That's not self-pity. It's a plain description of a Tuesday evening. The ribbon is on the counter beside the kettle, still in the little plastic sleeve they hand them out in. You've taken your coat off. You've put the kettle on out of habit rather than thirst.

You worked eleven months for this. You were right about the method when three people told you it wouldn't hold, and you were right about the timing, and the result on the table behind you settles it beyond any reasonable argument.

The person you most wanted to tell has been not speaking to you since April, over the same method, at the same table, in front of the same three people.

So the ribbon stays on the counter while the kettle does its noise. What you have wanted since you were about nineteen is sitting in a plastic sleeve four feet away from you, and you cannot make it warm the room.

You are able to hold a real victory and a real loss at the same time, and the second one does not cancel the first. The written Word puts all knowledge and all faith beside the word nothing in a single sentence, and the Holy Spirit makes that a description you can survive rather than a verdict.

Why This Particular Quiet Is So Hard to Name

If you'd lost, everybody would know what to do with you.

There are words for that. People bring food, or they say the decent sentence, or they leave you alone in the way that means they've noticed. Losing has a whole social apparatus built around it and all of it works.

Winning has nothing. You cannot tell anybody that the best month of your professional life has been one of the loneliest, because it sounds like ingratitude or like fishing, and you'd rather sit in a kitchen than have it sound like either.

So the ache goes unspoken, which is the part that does the damage. It isn't the absence of the person. It's the absence of the person plus the requirement to look pleased about everything else.

Everything on the List, and Nothing

Here's Paul, writing to a church with arguments running in every direction:

And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.1 Corinthians 13:2 (KJV)

Charity there is the old word for love, meaning the ordinary business of caring about a person rather than a point.

Notice that he builds the most impressive list he can imagine and then grants every item on it. He doesn't say the prophecy failed or the knowledge was faulty. The mountain moves. It genuinely moves.

Then he puts I am nothing on the end, and he's not describing the achievements. He's describing the man holding them.

You can be entirely right and still be standing in an empty kitchen, and Scripture says both at once. The written Word grants the whole list before it names the emptiness, and the Holy Spirit makes that honesty bearable instead of crushing.

The Ribbon Was Never the Thing You Wanted

Here's what I'd carry out of that kitchen if I could take a single thing away with me.

Nobody works eleven months for a piece of fabric in a plastic sleeve. That's obvious when it's said out loud and almost invisible from the inside.

What you wanted was the moment after. The phone call, the face, the particular person saying the particular thing that only they can say because only they know what the eleven months cost you. The ribbon was the ticket to that moment, and you have the ticket, and the moment isn't happening.

Which means what's on your counter isn't a disappointing prize. It's a correct receipt for a thing that was never what you were after, and the ache you're feeling is proof that you always knew the difference.

The ache is not ingratitude, it is evidence that you wanted the person all along. The written Word puts love above the whole list rather than alongside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can keep that longing from turning bitter.

Nothing Here Says You Should Have Lost

Let me be plain, because there's a version of this message that would do you real harm and I won't write it.

I'm not adjudicating April. I don't know what happened at that table, and nothing in this message hints that you should give up a position you believe to be true in order to be liked again.

I'm also not asking you to apologize for winning, or to pretend the method was doubtful when you know it wasn't. An apology you don't mean is a poor foundation, and the other person would hear the hollowness in it immediately.

You can be glad about the result and honest about the kitchen. Scripture holds the knowledge and the emptiness in one line without resolving either, and the Holy Spirit does the mending rather than the arbitrating.

Stories in these messages are illustrations unless marked as testimony.