I Cook at the Wrong End of My Day

Today we are making a thick potato and onion egg skillet, and it is the kind of thing that is good hot, warm, or cold out of the refrigerator at two in the morning.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cut four potatoes into thin slices and one onion into thin slices. Put them in a wide pan with a generous amount of oil over medium low heat, with plenty of salt, and cook them gently for about twenty minutes, turning now and then, until the potato is soft and giving. You are not frying them crisp, you are softening them in oil. Beat six eggs in a bowl with more salt. Tip the potatoes and onion into the eggs, mix, then put the whole thing back into the pan on low heat. Let it set slowly for about ten minutes, then either flip it or slide it under a broiler until the top is firm and cooked through with nothing runny anywhere. Let it stand for five minutes before cutting it into wedges. It feeds six, it costs almost nothing, and it keeps for two days.

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

It is that somebody reading this eats dinner at breakfast time.

You work nights. You come in at six or seven in the morning when everybody else is starting, and the hour when your body wants a real meal is the hour when the world thinks about cereal. So you have stopped cooking. You eat something out of a wrapper standing at the counter, or you eat nothing, and you sleep, and you get up in the afternoon and you do it again.

And underneath that there is a feeling that is hard to name, which is that your life is being lived slightly off to the side of everybody else's.

The verse that has God on your shift

There is a line in Psalm 121 that is about hours, and I do not think it gets read that way often enough.

Behold, he that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep. (Psalm 121:4, King James Version)

Read what it actually establishes. There is no hour in which God is off. Not one. The whole psalm is written for people traveling, at risk, in the dark, and its central claim is that the keeper of Israel is awake through every part of the night.

Which means the hours you are awake in are hours that are fully attended. Three in the morning is not a gap in the coverage. It is not the leftover part of a day. It is a watch, and Somebody else is keeping it with you.

You are working inside hours that are completely attended, and God has never once been absent from the night shift. Psalm 121:4 says the keeper of Israel neither slumbers nor sleeps, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a man driving home at six in the morning.

You have not been living off to the side of anything, and heaven has never once run on the schedule of everybody else's day. It is written that He does not slumber, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in the room where the potatoes are softening.

Why the hour feels wrong and is not

Now let me say plainly what has happened to the eating, because a person on this schedule gets treated as an exception and is not one.

Almost everything about food assumes a day that runs from seven in the morning to ten at night. Menus, opening times, what people ask about, what is considered normal to want. So a person who runs on a different clock ends up feeling like their hunger is misfiled.

And then the practical result, which is the part I care about. Meals stop being meals. They become something eaten out of a packet in the wrong room at the wrong hour, because it seems absurd to cook a full dinner at half past six in the morning.

You are eating at an hour that is fully attended, and God has never once kept business hours. Psalm 121:4 has the keeper of Israel awake through every part of the night, which is the written word and not my opinion, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes six in the morning a watch rather than a leftover.

But there is nothing absurd about it. Your day ended. This is dinner. The clock is a convention, and your body is not confused about what it needs, it is only out of step with a timetable that was never made for it.

An hour on a clock is not a verdict on whether a person deserves a proper meal.

You are not eating at the wrong time, and God has never once attached a schedule to what a person is allowed to be fed. The passage puts God's attention on the night rather than on business hours, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the word wrong off an hour that a person cannot change.

You have been treating your own day as the leftover version of everybody else's. Psalm 121 is written for travelers moving at odd hours, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a night worker from believing they are living on the margin of something.

Cook the meal your day actually needs

Here is the practical part, and this dish is chosen for a reason.

A potato and egg skillet is the right food for a body that has been awake all night. It is warm, it is filling, it does not need a shop that is open, and it can be eaten at any hour without the meal itself being strange, because it is eaten at every hour across half the world.

And it keeps. Make it once, cut it into wedges, and eat it again when you get up at three in the afternoon. That is not sad. That is somebody solving a real problem with a real dish.

But here is the part I would ask for. Eat it at the table, on a plate, with the blind up if it is light. Not at the counter, not standing, not in the dark on your way to bed. Your day deserves an ending that looks like an ending.

You are worth a plate and a table at seven in the morning, and God has never once handed a person a lesser meal for a lesser hour. Psalm 121:4 has God keeping watch through every part of the night, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an unusual hour into a fully attended one.