I Close the Cupboard When People Come

Tonight we are making a pan of pasta with canned tuna, garlic and lemon, and it takes about as long as the pasta takes.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put a big pot of water on and salt it until it tastes like the sea. In a wide pan, warm a good amount of olive oil over low heat with three or four cloves of garlic, sliced thin. Keep the heat low and let the garlic go pale gold and no further, because burned garlic is bitter and there is no rescuing it. Add a can of tuna with its oil, break it up with the spoon, and add a pinch of chili flakes if you like heat. Cook the pasta, keep a mug of the water, then move the pasta straight into the pan with a good splash of that water and toss it hard so the starch and the oil come together into something that clings. Off the heat, squeeze in half a lemon and add black pepper and parsley if there is parsley. It feeds four, it costs very little, and it tastes like somebody meant it.

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

It is a small thing you do that I do not think you have ever told anybody about.

When somebody comes over, you close the cupboard door. Not dramatically. You just make sure it is shut before they get to the kitchen. And lately you have gone one step further, and you have stopped having people over at all, and you have given yourself perfectly good reasons for that, and none of the reasons are the real one.

The verse that puts the empty place in the window

There is a sentence Paul wrote that I think is one of the strangest and best in the New Testament.

And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly therefore will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. (2 Corinthians 12:9, King James Version)

Read what he does with it. He had a weakness he wanted removed, and God did not remove it, and Paul's response was not to hide it better. It was to put it in the window.

That is a genuinely odd instinct and it runs against everything you are doing at that cupboard door. Paul stopped covering the thin place, and the reason he gave was that covering it was the only thing keeping the strength of Christ off it.

You are allowed to have a thin shelf and an open door at the same time, and God has never once required a full cupboard as the price of company. Second Corinthians 12:9 has a man deliberately stop hiding the weak place, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that possible in a kitchen rather than only in a letter.

You have not been asked to be impressive, and there is nothing in Scripture that makes a well stocked house the condition of a welcome. It is written that His strength is made perfect in weakness, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the pasta is going on.

What the door is actually costing you

Let me name what that closed door has done, because I think the price has crept up on you.

It started as one small movement. Shut the cupboard, put the mug in front of the gap on the shelf, move the packet so the label does not show. Nothing. Two seconds.

But hiding is expensive to maintain, and it does not stay small. First you manage the cupboard. Then you manage the timing, so people come after the shopping and not before. Then you find it easier to see people somewhere else. Then you find it easier not to see them.

And here is the part that matters. The friend who was going to come over was not coming for the food. She was coming for you. A closed cupboard door is not a verdict on the person who closed it, but the closed front door behind it has cost you the one thing that actually helps.

You have been protecting them from something that would not have bothered them at all. The passage has Paul discover that the hidden place was the exact place the power was going to rest, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes that arithmetic believable to somebody standing in a small kitchen.

You are not less welcoming than you were, and the hospitality in you has never once depended on what is on that shelf. Second Corinthians 12 is a man writing plainly about a thin place in his own life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a hidden thing into a room somebody else can sit in.

What this pasta is actually made of

Now let me point at the pan, because the pan is making my argument for me.

There is nothing in that dish. Oil, garlic, a can of fish, lemon, pasta. That is a cupboard, not a shop. And it is one of the best things you can put in front of another human being, and people who have eaten it in kitchens like yours remember it for years.

The good in it is not the ingredients. It is the low heat under the garlic and the mug of pasta water and the fact that somebody tossed it properly instead of pouring sauce on top. All of that is attention, and attention is free, and attention is exactly what shame spends first.

So put it in a warm bowl and let somebody watch you make it.

You are handing people the part that lands, and the part that lands has never been the part that cost money. Second Corinthians 12:9 has strength arriving precisely where the resources ran out, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary pan of pasta into something a person remembers about your house.