I Cannot Pick Up the Small Pack

Tonight we are making a soup for two, and we are deliberately freezing half of it, and that is part of the point.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook one chopped onion, two chopped carrots and a stick of celery slowly in oil in a pot with salt, about eight minutes, until everything has softened. Add two chopped potatoes and four cups of water or broth. Bring it up and let it go for twenty minutes until the potato is completely soft. Take a mug of it out, blend or mash that, and stir it back in, which thickens the whole pot without any cream. Salt it properly and finish with black pepper and a splash of vinegar or lemon. Eat one bowl tonight. Put the second in a container, let it cool on the counter for no more than an hour, and then straight into the freezer. It costs about two dollars, it takes half an hour, and the frozen one is a dinner you will be glad of in three weeks.

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

It is the aisle.

You were standing in front of two packages. The big one, which you have bought for years, and the small one, which is the correct size for the number of people who now live in your house.

And your hand would not go to the small one. You stood there long enough that it became noticeable, and then you picked up the big one again, and you carried it to the register and paid for it and drove home.

And that was not about the price and it was not about waste, and I think you know that.

The verse about the thing already happening

There is a line in Isaiah that people quote for encouragement, and it has a question in the middle of it that most people skip.

Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, and rivers in the desert. (Isaiah 43:19, King James Version)

Read the question. Shall ye not know it? He is asking whether they will recognize the new thing while it is happening.

That question exists because the new thing does not announce itself. It springs up quietly, and it looks at first like an ordinary and rather thin day, and the danger is not that God does nothing. The danger is that a person is still watching for the old shape and does not notice the new one arriving.

You are living inside something that has already begun, and God has never once required a person to feel the change before it counted as one. Isaiah 43:19 has a new thing springing forth and asks whether it will be recognized, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that question off a page and puts it into a supermarket aisle.

You have not fallen behind, and heaven has never once measured a person by how quickly their hand adjusted. It is written that He makes a way in the wilderness, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the soup is going on.

What the small pack means

Now let me say what is actually in that hand, because it is not a package.

Buying the smaller size is a public act. It happens in a store, with other people around, and it puts something in a cart that says out loud how many people that kitchen cooks for now. It feels, to the body, like an announcement.

And so the hand does what a body does with an announcement it is not ready to make: it declines to make it. That is not weakness and it is not denial. It is a completely ordinary response to being asked to say something in public before it has been said in private.

A package on a shelf is not a verdict on a household. It is a quantity of food, decided by a factory, and it has no opinion about anybody.

You are not being asked to announce anything in that aisle, and God has never once made a person's grief a public declaration. The passage has a new thing spring up quietly and go unrecognized rather than arrive with a proclamation, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a change happen in private first.

You have been carrying something into a store every week, and nobody around you has any idea. Isaiah 43 is spoken to people who were still fully inside the old situation, and the Holy Spirit is the one who speaks about new things before the old ones have finished.

Do the private version first

Here is the practical part, and the order matters more than the action.

Do not start in the store. Start in your own kitchen, tonight, where nobody is watching.

Make the soup for two. Then take the second portion and put it in the freezer, deliberately, and look at it while you do. That is the whole exercise. Dinner has just been cooked for the number of people who live here, and the extra has gone somewhere useful rather than into the trash on Friday, and nobody saw any of it.

Do that a few times. And then, one week, the small pack will be less of a statement in the aisle, because it will already be true in the freezer.

You are allowed to do the private version of a thing before you do the public one. That is not cowardice, that is the sensible order.

You are permitted to change this quietly first, and God has never once demanded a public step before a private one. Isaiah 43:19 has the new thing springing forth before anybody notices it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a freezer door a reasonable place for something to begin.