The test on our kitchen table

There is a test sitting on my kitchen table. It has been there for days. It is not a school quiz, a civil service exam, a personality assessment, or any other man-devised evaluation. It does not look like a test at all. It is, to the naked eye, a stamped and addressed envelope, stationery pad, and common pen that I prepared and set out for my husband with the purpose that he write a letter to his needy friend in prison. My husband has a lot of good qualities, bounding ahead of me like a stallion past an old mare in matters of faith, but he does not seem to get around to writing letters.

Yet, as I say, the testing is not of him but of me. I suggested a few times that he jot a note to D.B., but he has found other things to do. I have moved the writing materials around to different spots on the table to make the installation more prominent, or in order to serve daily meals. Aha! You will say this is harassment, dear reader, but not so. The little pile has become not so much an irritation as invisible to my spouse, the way a photo affixed too long to the refrigerator door is invisible.

The question is how I will bring up the matter again. Several verbal strategies suggest themselves to the flesh: “I guess you don’t care about D.B. as much as I thought you did.” Or the more subtly passive-aggressive guilt trip: “Have you decided not to write to D.B. after all darling?” Or the certainly incendiary: “I have always looked up to you as a godly man, but now I’m not so sure.” Or, the equally pugnacious: “I’m not going for a walk with you until we sit down and write a letter to D.B.” Or I can be dramatic and remove the writing kit entirely from the table and choose to hunker down in a quietly critical spirit that will surface at some opportune time in the future.

Scripture says to love the Lord with “all your mind” and “all your strength.” The “mind” part calls for more mental muscularity than we sometimes realize. It asks that, putting to death our deliciously demonic fleshly desires, we compose ourselves to think through a matter to its depth, according to the high bar of what response would be most biblical, most of faith, most of neighborly love, and most glorifying to God. The “strength” part calls for exercising self-control (a fruit of the Spirit) to receive the findings of the consecrated “mind” and to implement them, rejecting all the flesh-gratifying control-freak approaches we thought up in the first five minutes, and employing the godliest of the 10 or so considered options.

So what if I were to approach my husband with a genuinely cheerful, and even playful, spirit and say something like, “OK, dear, I’m going to make you one of those fruit smoothies you love, and you and I are going to sit down and jot a very brief note to D.B. How about it, lover?”

I write this day about a letter on a table in my kitchen because I find there are no bigger issues, no larger battles. Our life is composed of this series of commonplace battles. And all moral courage begins, and is grown, in this laboratory of the ordinary.