The Washboard on the Kitchen Wall

It hangs on the wall between the window and the pantry door, and it has hung there since they moved in. Galvanized tin in a wood frame, one corner of the frame split and mended with a screw, the ridges worn shallow in the middle where forty years of somebody's hands went.

It was her grandmother's. That is the whole reason it is up there. Ruth put it up the first week because the kitchen was bare and it was the one thing she had that meant anything, and people who come in say it is lovely, and it is.

She is standing at the counter with the kettle on and she is looking at it.

Not for the first time. She has been doing this on and off since spring, and she could not tell you when it started. She looks at the ridges, and at the worn place in the middle, and she thinks about how many hours are in that worn place, and how her grandmother would have stood over it in a yard with her forearms red.

And she thinks: it never got everything out.

That is the thought. That is the whole thought. It got the dirt out and it got the sweat out and it got a lot of things out that would not come out any other way, and there was still a category of thing it was never built to touch, and everybody who ever used one knew that, and used it anyway.

There is something Ruth carries. She has taken it to God and she was not careless about it and she was not vague. She has never told a living soul and she does not intend to.

And she stands in her kitchen with the kettle coming up and looks at a piece of tin on the wall and thinks about the limits of it.

One word first about who is being spoken to here. This is written to the one whose thing was her own doing, brought to God and settled and still being answered for in her own kitchen. If what sits on you was put there by another person, this page is not addressed to you, and nothing in it treats what was done to you as though it were something you did; there is a page on this site written for you and it will not ask you to confess anything. Now, if you have a thing you have brought to God and settled and are still somehow answering, I want to take you into a courtroom scene that is short and strange, and I want you to count something while we are in there.

Count how many words he says

Here is the scene. A man named Joshua is standing in front of the angel of the Lord, and there is an accuser standing at his right hand to accuse him. And Joshua is standing there in garments that everybody in the room can see, which is the text's own way of saying nothing about this is private.

Then this happens.

And he answered and spake unto those that stood before him, saying, Take away the filthy garments from him. And unto him he said, Behold, I have caused thine iniquity to pass from thee, and I will clothe thee with change of raiment.

Now count the words Joshua says.

He does not say any. Not one, in the entire scene. He does not defend himself, he does not explain, he does not confess, he does not agree, he does not ask. He stands there and the whole thing happens over his head and around him and to him.

I want you to sit with how unusual that is, because most of us have an instinct that says the accused person has to say something. That is how every court we have ever seen on a screen works. Somebody has to answer.

He answers nothing, and it is settled anyway.

You are standing in a scene where the accused was never once required to speak, and the settling did not wait on him. Zechariah 3:4 has the whole exchange and Joshua is silent through every word of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a written scene and makes it real in a kitchen, so this does not rest on how well you can put your own case.

That is the first thing the tin on the wall cannot do. A washboard is a tool for a person who is answering. It is for the one who has to get it out. And there is a scene in Scripture where the one who has to get it out is not the one wearing the garments.

You have been left with nothing to answer, and having nothing to answer is not a hole in your case. It is written that the accused stood silent and the order went out anyway, and His Spirit is the one carrying a written settlement into a life, which is why it holds on an afternoon when nothing in you agrees.

The order was given to somebody else

Look who gets spoken to.

Take away the garments from him. That is not addressed to Joshua. It is addressed to those that stood before him, the attendants, the ones standing by. The Lord turns to the staff and gives them the instruction.

Nobody says to the man: take those off. Nobody hands him a brush. Nobody asks him whether he is ready, or whether he has understood the seriousness, or whether he can be trusted with new clothes if they give him any.

The whole removal is arranged around him and performed on him by other hands.

That is why standing in a kitchen looking at a washboard and thinking about limits is such a tender thing to me. A woman is holding a tool for a job that was assigned, in the text, to somebody else entirely, and no one ever told her.

You were never given the removal to do, and the order for it went to hands that were not yours. Scripture puts the command to the attendants and not to the accused, and the same Spirit who inspired that line is the one testifying inside a person now.

I want to put something here in the middle, in plain sight and not tucked away at the bottom. If the standing and thinking has stretched out past an afternoon, if the nights have gotten long and the thinking has gone past regret and out toward wishing you were not here, get somebody alongside you. Call a doctor. Sit down with a counselor. If tonight is a dark one, call or text 988 or your local crisis line and let another person be in it with you. That is not the smaller road and it is not a soft place in anybody's faith. God has always worked through people, and one sitting at your table is part of what He is doing rather than an alternative to it.

He was not left standing bare

And here is the part I would not want you to miss, because a great many people stop reading at the removal.

The sentence does not end with take away. It goes straight on: I will clothe thee with change of raiment.

There is no gap. He is not stripped and left standing in a courtroom while everybody waits to see what he does next. The removal and the clothing are one motion, arranged by the same authority, carried out by the same attendants, and a few lines later they put a clean turban on his head as well and the Lord is standing right there while they do it.

That matters, because a lot of us have quietly assumed that being dealt with means being left exposed. It does not. In the one scene Scripture gives us, the man ends the day better dressed than anybody in the room.

You have been clothed as well as cleared, and the two came in the same sentence with nothing in between them. Zechariah 3:4 puts take away and I will clothe in one breath, and the Spirit takes what is written and makes it living in a person, so the covering is not something you are waiting on.

Now I will be honest with you. I am not going to tell you that you look at that washboard tomorrow and feel nothing. That is not mine to promise and I would not think much of myself for saying it. The fact and the feeling keep different hours and they always have.

You are clean while the thought is still in the room, and the thought has no standing to overturn the order. It is written and it was carried out, and it is His Spirit and not the strength of your agreement who makes a written thing real in a body.