I Am Waiting Until I Can Do It Properly

Tonight we are making a pan of baked chicken and rice, and we are making two of them in the same oven, and the second one is the whole point.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Heat the oven to 400. In each of two oven dishes, stir together a cup of rice, two cups of broth or water with a stock cube, half a chopped onion, salt and any dried herb. Lay four chicken thighs on top of each, skin up, and salt the skin well. Cover both dishes tightly with foil and bake for forty minutes. Take the foil off and give them fifteen to twenty more, until the rice has drunk everything and the chicken is browned and cooked all the way through with no pink at the bone. Let them stand five minutes. Lemon over both. Each pan feeds four, they cost a few dollars, and the second one goes out of your house before the week is over.

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

It is the person you have been meaning to feed since about April.

You know who. You have thought about it more times than you could count. And every time, the thought arrives with a set of conditions attached to it, and the conditions have never all been met at once.

When I have a free Saturday. When I have the good dish back. When I can make something proper rather than a weeknight thing. When the house is fit for somebody to come in, in case they want to come in. When I am not in the middle of this stretch at work.

And here is what has happened while all of that was being arranged. Nothing. Since April.

The verse about waiting for the weather

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that is about farming and is really about this exact thing.

He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap. (Ecclesiastes 11:4, King James Version)

Read what the man in that verse is doing. He is not lazy and he is not careless. He is watching the weather, which is a completely sensible thing for a farmer to do, and he is waiting for conditions that are right.

And the result is that nothing gets planted and nothing gets harvested, which is the one outcome worse than sowing in imperfect weather.

The verse is not against wisdom. It is against a particular failure that looks exactly like wisdom from the outside and produces an empty field.

You are watching for conditions that do not have to arrive, and God has never once made a good week the requirement for a good act. Ecclesiastes 11:4 names careful waiting as the thing that produces nothing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen in September.

You have not been neglectful for a single day, and heaven has never once counted a delayed intention as indifference. It is written that he that observeth the wind shall not sow, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the oven is heating.

Whose standard is it

Now let me ask about the conditions, because I think it is worth knowing where they came from.

Nobody set them but you. The person waiting for that food has never once specified a Saturday, or a proper dish, or a tidy house. They do not know any of the conditions exist. As far as they are concerned, nobody has come, and there is no explanation attached to that, and the absence of an explanation is what a person fills in with their own worst guess.

And the standard itself is not wrong. Doing something properly is good. But properly has quietly become the enemy of at all, and there is only one of those two that feeds anybody.

You are able to do the small version now, and God has never once required the full version before He would count it. Ecclesiastes 11:4 puts an empty field at the end of careful waiting, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves a person from arranging into doing.

Something is better than nothing is a genuinely low bar and I am asking you to accept it for one week.

A weeknight dish delivered is not a lesser thing than a Saturday dish imagined.

You are able to do the small version now, and God has never once required the full version before He would count it. The passage puts an empty field at the end of careful waiting, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves somebody from arranging to doing.

You have wanted to do this since April, and wanting it that long is the evidence that it is real. Ecclesiastes 11 tells people to sow in the morning and again in the evening because they do not know which will prosper, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the calculation out of somebody's hands.

Make two of the same thing

Here is the practical part, and it is designed to remove every condition at once.

Make two pans at the same time. Same oven, same forty minutes, same everything. The second one costs you the price of the ingredients and about four extra minutes of work, and no free Saturday is required anywhere.

Take it in a foil pan or a container you do not need back, so there is no dish to retrieve and no return visit to arrange.

You have everything this needs already, and God has never once made a clear Saturday the condition of a good act. Scripture puts it plainly in Ecclesiastes 11, and the Holy Spirit carries it further than a page can: sow in the morning and in the evening, because nobody knows which will prosper.

Leave it at a door if the house is not fit, or if nobody is fit for a conversation, or if it is late. A container on a step with a message is a complete delivery.

And do it before Sunday. Give it a day, out loud, right now, because since April is what happens to a thing with no day attached to it.

You are permitted to do this the easy way, and God has never once made the harder version the only acceptable one. Ecclesiastes 11:4 warns against a waiting that never ends, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes two pans in one oven into the end of five months.