I Am Saving the Good One for Company

Tonight we are making a pot of rice and pigeon peas, and we are using the good seasoning, and that is not a small part of the instruction.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook half a chopped onion, a chopped pepper and two cloves of garlic in oil in a pot for six minutes with salt. Add a big spoon of whatever your best seasoning is, the green one in the refrigerator or the jar of dried mix, and stir it in the oil for a minute so it opens up. Tip in a can of pigeon peas with their liquid, a cup of coconut milk if there is any or a cup of water if there is not, and one and a half cups of water on top of that. Add a sprig of thyme and plenty of salt. Bring it up, then add a cup and a half of rice, stir once, lid on, lowest heat, twenty five minutes, do not lift the lid. Off the heat for five. Fork it through. It feeds five, or one person for four days, and it costs a couple of dollars.

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

It is the jar at the back of the cupboard.

You know the one. The good seasoning, or the proper cheese, or the oil somebody brought you back from somewhere. It has been there a while. You have taken it out and looked at it and put it back more than once.

And the reason it goes back is always the same and it is never said out loud: I will use it when somebody comes.

And here is the thing you have not quite noticed. Nobody has come for a while, and the jar is still there, and you have been eating the second best version of your own food in your own kitchen for about eighteen months.

The woman who poured it out anyway

There is a scene in John where somebody does the exact opposite of saving something.

Then took Mary a pound of ointment of spikenard, very costly, and anointed the feet of Jesus, and wiped his feet with her hair: and the house was filled with the odour of the ointment. (John 12:3, King James Version)

She uses all of it. Not a little. The whole thing, at once, on one evening, in an ordinary house at an ordinary dinner.

And she is criticized for it immediately, on entirely sensible grounds, by somebody doing arithmetic about what it could have been used for instead.

And Jesus defends her. He says leave her alone. The waste, as the room saw it, is the thing He commends, and the detail the text keeps is that the whole house smelled of it, which is what happens when a good thing gets opened rather than stored.

You are allowed to open the good thing, and God has never once told a person to keep it back for somebody more important. John 12:3 has an entire jar poured out at once and defended against the arithmetic in the room, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen with a cupboard door open.

You have not been extravagant by using it, and heaven has never once counted a good thing spent on a household of one as wasted. It is written that the house was filled with the smell of it, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the seasoning is opening up in the oil.

What the saving is actually saying

Now let me name the sentence underneath it, because I do not think it is about thrift.

Saving the good thing for company means that company is the occasion and the cook is not. It ranks the people who might arrive above the person standing in that kitchen every single day.

And that is not humility. Humility is thinking about yourself less, and this is thinking about yourself as less, and the two are entirely different things that get mixed up constantly in kitchens.

You are the occasion in your own house, and God has never once ranked a visitor above the person standing in the kitchen. The Spirit of God is not quiet about this: John 12:3 has a costly thing poured out in full at an ordinary dinner and defended out loud, and He is saying it over a cupboard tonight.

There is also a practical failure in it. Things go off. Seasoning loses its edge, oil turns, cheese hardens. A good thing kept for an occasion that never arrives does not stay good, and eventually it gets thrown out having fed nobody at all, which is the only outcome in this entire situation that is genuinely a waste.

Saving something back is not a verdict on how much a person is worth. But it is a ranking, and rankings repeated become beliefs.

You are the occasion, and God has never once made a person's own table the lesser event. The passage has the whole jar poured out on an ordinary evening rather than saved for a better one, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves somebody out of the second tier of their own house.

You have been eating your own second best for a long time, and there is nobody in heaven who agreed with that arrangement. John 12 has extravagance defended against practical arithmetic, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the same over a cupboard.

Open it tonight and use enough of it

Here is the practical part, and there is a specific amount attached to it.

Take the jar out. Open it. Use a proper amount, not a careful one.

That last part is the whole exercise. There is a way of using a saved thing that is not really using it, where a person opens it and takes a tiny amount and puts it back feeling slightly virtuous, and nothing has actually changed.

You are permitted to spend the best of it on yourself, and God has never once required an audience before something good could be opened. It is written that the house was filled with the smell of it, which is what happens when a thing gets opened rather than stored, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a jar off a shelf.

Put in a full spoon. Let it open in the oil for a minute, which is what makes it taste of anything. Let the kitchen smell of it, because the smell filling the house is the part the text bothered to record.

And then eat it, and know that the good thing was used on you, on a Tuesday, with nobody watching.

You are permitted to spend the best of what you have on yourself, and God has never once required an audience before something good could be opened. John 12:3 has a costly thing poured out in full and commended for it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a full spoon out of a saved jar an act of agreement with heaven.