Somebody Will Call It a Waste
The word for Monday, August 17, 2026 is Somebody Will Call It a Waste.
The anchor verses are John 12:7 and Romans 5:5.
Mikayla Khramov is a musician in Los Angeles. Years ago she started volunteering at a horse rescue in Moorpark, California, because there was a horse there named Yupia that she wanted to see.
He was not available for adoption. She could not take him home. He was untrained and, by the accounts of that time, frustrated.
She volunteered at that rescue for three years.
Three years of driving out to a barn to visit an animal that was not hers and could not be hers. She had never owned a horse in her life. She said that once she met him she could not imagine not having him in it. So she kept going, and eventually he became available, and she took him.
Then one afternoon she brought her guitar to the barn.
She was not expecting anything. Her own words: she thought she would get a cute video of him standing in the background. Instead he walked over and put his face into what she was doing and engaged with the instrument.
The next day she brought a harp, and he came up and started strumming the strings with his nose.
Now whatever she brings, even the accordion, he comes over and starts working on it. He has moved from his nose to his teeth, and she has had to remind him to be gentler.
She works two jobs. She is putting together her first album, hopes to finish it next month, and this horse is on it.
And something changed in her. Music had turned into a grind, years of gigs and bands and chasing the next payday. She says he gave it back to her. She goes out and writes now, and he comes over and joins in, and it is fun again.
Three years of visits to a horse she was not allowed to keep.
From the outside, three years of visits to a horse she could not take home could easily look like wasted time.
Open the twelfth chapter of John, six days before the Passover, at a dinner in Bethany.
Mary comes in with a pound of pure nard. It is an imported perfume and it is worth about a year of a working man's wages. She pours it on HIS feet and wipes them with her hair, and John says the house filled up with the smell of it.
Then Judas speaks, and hear how reasonable it sounds.
Why was this ointment not sold for three hundred pence and given to the poor?
That is not a stupid question. It is arithmetic. A year of wages could feed a lot of people, and pouring it on somebody's feet feeds nobody. On paper he is right.
John tells us what was underneath it. Judas kept the money bag and helped himself to what was in it. But even a person with clean hands could have asked that question, and people have been asking it ever since.
Jesus answers with three words.
Let her alone.
HE does not explain her to the room. HE does not argue the economics. HE puts HIMSELF between a woman and the man doing math about her, and HE tells him to stop.
A hundred years later a teacher named Marcion did the same arithmetic on a much larger scale.
He looked at the GOD of the law and the prophets, decided that GOD could not possibly be the Father of Jesus Christ, and then took a knife to the text. He cut the birth out of Luke. He cut the passages where Christ calls the Maker of this world HIS Father. He cut whole sections out of Paul.
Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century teacher who defended the faith against those who dressed up error to look like truth, wrote it down and said the thing that lands hardest. Marcion did not hand his followers the Gospel. He handed them a fragment of it.
That is what the accounting instinct does when you let it run. It trims until everything is defensible, and what is left is smaller than what you started with.
Paul writes to Rome that the love of GOD is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost. Shed abroad. Poured out. The same motion as the jar.
GOD did not measure it out. HE did not calculate a sufficient dose.
There is something in your life that does not add up. Time you give to somebody who cannot return it. A person you keep driving out to see. Work nobody is paying you for. A thing you make that will never earn back the hours.
Somebody has told you it is a waste, or you have told yourself.
Mary got called wasteful in front of everybody at that table, and Christ told the man to leave her alone, and two thousand years later we are still talking about what she did with that jar.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one whose love for somebody does not show up anywhere on paper.
- 🙏 To the one who has been doing the math on your own life and coming up short.
- 🙏 To the one nobody has defended out loud.
- 🙏 To the one still driving out there to visit, with no promise of ever taking anything home.
Grace and Peace.