Verse of the Day for March 7

Martha is hosting, and she is doing it properly. Jesus has arrived with a group and somebody has to feed them, and that somebody is her while her sister sits down.

Her complaint is entirely reasonable and she takes it straight to him. Do you not care. Tell her to help me.

He says her name twice, which in that culture is a softening, not a scolding. Martha, Martha. And then: careful and troubled about many things.

Careful in the older sense — full of care, anxious. He does not say the meal does not matter or that hospitality is unspiritual. He says she is troubled about many things, and one thing is needful.

The problem was never the serving. It was that the serving had multiplied into many things until it crowded out the one person she was serving it for, who was sitting in her house, available, for a limited time.

Busyness rarely arrives as one large wrong decision. It arrives as many small right ones that were each individually defensible.

He was in the house. That was the part that would not be there tomorrow.