Five Dinners and Money for Three

Tonight we are making a pot of chickpeas and tomatoes, and putting it over rice.

Here is the whole thing in one paragraph, because you did not come here for a method. Cut an onion small and cook it in oil over medium heat until it goes soft and golden, which takes about eight minutes and is the only part that needs your attention. Stir in a spoon of tomato paste and whatever warm spice you have, cumin or paprika or both, and let it cook for one minute so it stops tasting raw. Add a can of chickpeas with its liquid, a can of chopped tomatoes, and a cup of water. Salt it properly. Let it sit on a low simmer for twenty minutes with the lid partly on. Cook rice while it does that. Squeeze lemon over the top if you have a lemon. It feeds four people, it costs very little, and it is genuinely good, and it is good because of the onion and the salt, not because of anything expensive.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the chickpeas.

It is that there is a particular kind of arithmetic that a person does in their head at odd hours, and you cannot stop doing it. Five dinners left in the week. Money for three of them. And the strange part is not the shortage. The strange part is that you are the only person in the house who knows the number, and you have been carrying it by yourself since Tuesday, and you have kept your face normal the whole time.

The verse that refuses to look past tonight

There is a sentence of Jesus that people quote to calm somebody down, and it does something much stranger than that when you read it slowly.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof. (Matthew 6:34, King James Version)

Read the last line again. He is not saying the trouble is imaginary. He says the day has enough evil in it. He agrees with you about the arithmetic. He refuses, flatly, to let you carry five days of it in one evening.

That is not comfort. That is a boundary, drawn around tonight, by somebody with the authority to draw it.

You have been given one day at a time on purpose, and that has never been a smaller portion than you needed. It is written in Matthew 6 that the morrow will take thought for itself, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that read as mercy rather than as a door closing.

You are not being asked to feed a whole month standing at this stove, and you never were. Matthew 6:34 has Jesus put a fence around a single day and tell His people to stay inside it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a fence like that feel like relief instead of a rule.

What the counting is doing to you

I want to say something careful about the arithmetic, because I am not going to insult you by calling it worry.

It is not worry. It is competence. The numbers are getting run because somebody in this house has to run them, and that counting is the reason there has been food on that table at all. Somebody in the house is doing the math and it is you, and nobody has thanked you for it because nobody knows.

But here is what the counting costs, and I think you already feel it. It moves you out of tonight. You stand over a pot that is going to feed four people in twenty minutes, and you are not in the room, you are on Thursday, and Thursday is not solved and cannot be solved from here. So the food gets made by a person who is somewhere else, and you sit down to eat a meal you never actually tasted. A cheap pot is not a verdict on the cook, and it never has been.

You are allowed to be in this kitchen tonight, and God has never once required you to solve Thursday before you are permitted to eat. The written word says the day has enough of its own, and the Spirit of God is the one who walks a person back into the hour they are actually standing in.

And there is a second cost, which is quieter. Carrying a number alone makes it heavier than it is. Not because the number changes, but because a thing nobody else knows starts to feel like a thing nobody else would understand, and from there it starts to feel like a thing about you.

You have not become the number you have been carrying, and it has never once been a verdict on the kind of provider you are. That is not my kindness talking. Matthew 6 puts the trouble on the day and not on the person, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is the one who separates a hard week from a person's worth.

Why I am not telling you to stop counting

Now I have to be honest with you, because there is a version of this article that would do damage.

The version that says stop counting, trust God, it will work out. I am not writing that. I do not know what Thursday holds and neither does anybody who tells you they do, and people in your position have been handed that sentence for a long time and it has left them feeling like the shortage was a failure of belief.

So here is what I am actually saying. Count. Count carefully, because it is wise, and because it is your job, and because nobody in that house does it better. Then, at some point in the evening, put the counting down and cook.

You have been counting because somebody had to, and God has never once called competence a failure of trust. It is written in Matthew 6 that the day carries enough of its own, which is a boundary rather than a rebuke, and the Spirit of God is the one who sets that boundary at an hour a person gets to choose.

That is the whole discipline. Not the absence of arithmetic. The end of it, at an hour you choose.

In my part of the world there is a way of cooking that assumes the pot will stretch. You start with an onion because an onion is always there. You reach for what is dried and stored because that is what a house keeps. Nobody calls it poverty cooking. It is the ordinary way food has been made in courtyards for a very long time, and it produces something worth sitting down for.

You are cooking the way most of the world has always cooked, and there has never been anything second rate about a pot built from what is stored. The passage does not rank a person's dinner, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the word cheap out of a meal and leaves the meal standing.