I Cook Big So the House Sounds Full

Tonight we are making a half batch of chili, and half is the assignment.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Brown half a pound of ground beef in a pot over medium high heat, breaking it up, and cook it all the way through until there is no pink left anywhere. Push it aside, add a chopped onion and a chopped pepper, and let them soften for five minutes with salt. Add two cloves of chopped garlic, a big spoon of chili powder and a spoon of cumin, and stir it for a minute so the spices lose their raw edge. Add a can of chopped tomatoes, a can of beans with their liquid, and half a cup of water. Bring it up, then let it go on low for twenty five minutes, stirring now and then. Salt again at the end and squeeze lime over it. It feeds three, it costs a few dollars, and it is better than a big pot of it because a smaller amount reduces properly.

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

It is that you have been cooking too much on purpose, and I do not think you have ever said why out loud.

You make enough for eight when there are three. You start early. You use pans you do not need. And the reason is not the food, and it is not generosity, and it is not that you cannot do arithmetic.

It is that a kitchen in full production sounds like a full house. Lids and taps and a spoon on a pot and the extractor going. And for the hour or so that all of that is happening, the house has a noise in it that it used to have all the time.

And then it stops, and the quiet comes back in, and you are more tired than the cooking accounts for.

The verse about who God puts in the quiet houses

There is a short line in Psalm 68 that is easy to read past, and it says something very specific.

God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those which are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. (Psalm 68:6, King James Version)

Read what He does. Not comforts the solitary. Not tells the solitary to be content. He sets them in families, which is an active placement of a person into a household.

And notice the company that line keeps in the verse. It sits directly beside prisoners being brought out. Whoever wrote that considered a quiet house and a locked door to be problems of the same order, worth naming in the same breath, and worth God doing something about rather than explaining away.

You are not being told to make peace with the quiet, and God has never once treated a silent house as a thing to be endured. Psalm 68:6 has God actively setting solitary people into households, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at six in the evening.

You have not been overlooked in this, and heaven has never once considered a quiet room a small matter. It is written that God sets the solitary in families, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the chili is going on.

What all the cooking is costing

Now let me name the cost, because the strategy has been working and that is exactly the problem.

Manufacturing noise does work. It fills an hour. And because it works, there has never been a reason to look at what it is covering, and so a person can run that system for years and end up exhausted, with a refrigerator full of food nobody wants and a quiet that has not moved an inch.

And there is a second cost. The cooking takes the hour when you could have called somebody. It is a full time occupation, and it is occupying exactly the part of the evening where company would have to be arranged.

Cooking too much is not a verdict on a person's sense. It is a very intelligent solution to the wrong problem.

You are not foolish for the way you have handled this, and God has never once mocked a person for the tools they found. The passage names the solitary as people God moves toward rather than people He corrects, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a strategy that worked from a person who is failing.

You have been running that hour on your own for a long time, and the tiredness is coming from the running and not from the cooking. Psalm 68 puts loneliness next to captivity in one sentence, and the Holy Spirit is the one who treats it with that much seriousness in an ordinary week.

Let it be quiet for twenty five minutes

Here is the practical part, and it has two halves, and they are both small.

The first half is tonight. Cook the half batch, and then, when it goes on to simmer, do not start something else. Do not put a program on. Sit down in the kitchen with the quiet for twenty five minutes while it cooks.

That is going to be uncomfortable and I am not pretending otherwise. But the quiet is not an enemy and it has never once done anybody harm, and sitting in it for twenty five minutes with something good cooking is about the gentlest possible way to find that out.

You have not been left alone in this house, and God has never once treated a silent room as a small matter. It is written that God sets the solitary in families, which is an active placing rather than a comforting word, and the Spirit of God is the one who does that placing while a pot simmers.

The second half is this week. Ask one person to come and eat. Not a gathering. One person, one evening, with no cooking done in advance to prove anything.

Because the answer to a quiet house is people in it, and it has never once been more food.

You are permitted to sit still while something cooks, and God has never once asked anybody to keep a room loud to be alright in it. Psalm 68:6 has the answer to solitude arriving as company rather than as activity, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an invitation possible in a week where the pans were doing the work.