The God Who Provides Has a Name for It

The calendar on her kitchen wall is the free kind, with a photograph of a lake at the top and squares too small to write much in. There is one circle on it, drawn hard, in pen, around the fifteenth. She drew it in the spring and it is still there.

She does not need the calendar any more. She could tell you the number of days without looking up, the way you know your own age. Eleven. It was nineteen last week. She checks it anyway, several times a day, on her way past to do something else, and every time she does it her shoulders come up half an inch and stay there for an hour.

Nobody in her life knows the number. She has become extremely good at the sentence that keeps people from asking, and she says it lightly, with a small laugh at the end, and it works every time. What she cannot say out loud, to anyone, is the thing she thinks at two in the afternoon when the house is empty: that a grown woman should not be standing in her own kitchen doing arithmetic she already knows the answer to. The shame is not about the number. It is about being the kind of person who has that number.

And she prays. She prays for other people fully and freely, with faith, out loud. When it comes to the circled date she goes formal. She hears her own voice change. She asks in a small, tidy, careful way, as if she is bothering somebody important with something beneath his notice.

You have a date. You know its number today without checking. And I would guess you have gone quiet about it with almost everyone, including, in a way you would find hard to explain, with God.

The name was given on the mountain

Let me name the weight first, because it is not really the number either.

It is the loneliness of it. A need with a date on it does something to a person that a general worry never does. It puts a clock in the house. Every ordinary thing you do gets measured against it: the meal you cook, the tank you fill, the small kindness you were going to do for somebody and quietly did not, because you cannot spend what you might need on the fifteenth. And on top of that sits the part you will not say, which is that somewhere in you it feels like a verdict. Like the number is a report card on your whole life. Like a person walking with God should not be counting days on a free calendar with a lake on it.

I want to be very plain with you. That is not what it is. A need is not a grade. It is not a punishment, it is not a sign that God has withdrawn, and it is not what you failed to have enough faith for. Some of the most faithful people who have ever lived have stood exactly where you are standing, with a date on the wall, and Scripture does not treat one of them as a failure. The Spirit is in that kitchen at two in the afternoon, and He is not standing there reading a report card over you.

So let me take you up a mountain where a man had a deadline he could not move, and the thing he needed was not on the mountain when he got there.

So Abraham called the name of that place, "The LORD will provide"; as it is said to this day, "On the mount of the LORD it shall be provided."Genesis 22:14

Read what actually happened on that hill. Abraham walked three days with a fixed hour in front of him and nothing in his hands. He built an altar at the top with the need still unmet. And it was not until the very last moment, at the altar, with the knife in the air, that God spoke and there was a ram caught in a thicket that had not been there when Abraham started climbing.

Now watch what Abraham does with it, because this is the part that is for you.

He does not name the ram. He names the place.

He takes that hilltop and puts a name on it, and the name is about who God is, not about what showed up. The Hebrew underneath it carries the idea of seeing: God sees ahead, God sees to it. That is why some translations say the LORD will provide and others say on the mountain of the LORD it shall be seen. Both are reaching for the same thing. The provision and the seeing are one act. God had already seen the hill Abraham was climbing before Abraham left home.

And Abraham does not name it privately. The verse says as it is said to this day. He put a name on that ground so that other people, standing on their own hard hill with a date they could not move, would know that somebody had already been up here and God had a name here.

Here is what that means in your kitchen. The place with the circle on the calendar is not a place God has never been. It has a name on it. Somebody left it there for you.

And this is not ancient history that stopped. The One who saw ahead for Abraham did not become a different God. When Jesus taught about need he took people outside and pointed at the birds, which do not plant or harvest or store anything, and said the Father feeds them, and then he said the sentence people skip past: your Father knows what you need. Knows. Present tense, before you ask, in detail, including the number you have not said out loud to anybody.

And let me put one more thing beside you, so you know what company you are in. Paul wrote that his God would supply every need of theirs according to his riches in glory, and people quote that line constantly. Fewer people notice where he was standing when he wrote it. A few sentences earlier he says he has learned to be content in any situation, that he knows how to be brought low and he knows how to abound, that he has learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. He was not writing from comfort. He was writing as a man who had gone without and had also been surprised, more than once, by a God who saw to it. The promise came out of the mouth of somebody who had counted days himself. Philippians 4:19 was written out of that man's own shortage, and the Spirit who moved him to write it stands beside your calendar with the same steadiness He gave him.

I am not going to tell you what is going to happen on the fifteenth. Nobody honest can tell you that, and a person who promises you an outcome is not helping you, they are handing you one more thing that could break. What I can tell you, and I will stake everything on it, is that you are not carrying this alone, and that the God who sees to it has seen your date, and that you have never for one second been beneath his notice.