I Eat at the Counter Scrolling

Tonight we are making a rice bowl with canned fish, cucumber and soy, and there is no cooking in it beyond the rice.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put rice on, or warm leftover rice in a pan with a splash of water and a lid. Open a can of fish, whichever kind is in the house, and drain it. Cut half a cucumber into thin slices and toss them in a small bowl with a spoon of vinegar, a pinch of sugar and a pinch of salt, and leave them for five minutes, which turns them from a garnish into something with a bite to it. Put the rice in a bowl, the fish on one side, the cucumber on the other. Soy sauce, sesame oil if there is any, and hot sauce. Anything green on top. It takes about six minutes if the rice is already cooked, it costs about two dollars, and it is a genuinely good bowl of food.

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

It is the phone.

You eat at the counter with it in your hand every night. Not doing anything in particular on it. Scrolling. And the meal takes about ten minutes, and somewhere in those ten minutes you get from being a person who just got in from work to a person who is done with dinner, and none of it registers.

And I do not think you are addicted to anything. I think the scrolling is doing a job. It is getting you through ten minutes that would otherwise be silent, and it has been doing that job so reliably for so long that nobody has ever asked what those ten minutes might be for instead.

The one instruction most people find hardest

There is a line in Psalm 46 that people quote for comfort and that is actually a command.

Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. (Psalm 46:10, King James Version)

Be still. It is an imperative, and in the psalm it arrives in the middle of chaos: nations raging, mountains moving, waters roaring. This is not a verse about a quiet life. It is spoken over a situation that is loud.

And notice the order. Be still, and then know. The stillness comes first and the knowing follows from it, which means that the knowing is not available at speed. There are things a person cannot find out while they are moving.

You are invited into ten minutes of stillness rather than commanded into a discipline, and God has never once required a person to fill every gap in a day. Psalm 46:10 puts stillness before knowing rather than after it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at the end of a shift.

You have not been failing at anything, and heaven has never once graded a person on how they got through a Tuesday evening. It is written that we are to be still and know, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the rice is warming.

What the ten minutes could hold

Now let me be honest about why the phone wins, because it is not weakness and it deserves a fair hearing.

Ten silent minutes at the end of a working day are not automatically restful. For a lot of people they are the opposite. Silence is where the day catches up, and the list arrives, and the thing that has gone unthought about since Tuesday gets its chance.

So the scrolling is not laziness. It is a very effective way of not being alone with a day, and it works, and the fact that it works is exactly why it has never been examined.

You have ten minutes that belong to nobody else, and God has never once asked a person to fill every silence they own. Psalm 46:10 speaks stillness into raging nations rather than into a calm week, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a back step and a bowl into that stillness.

But here is what it costs. Those ten minutes are the only genuinely unclaimed part of your day. Everything else belongs to work or to sleep or to the things you have to do. And they are being spent on something that leaves nothing behind, which means the day contains no moment that was actually yours.

Ten minutes on a phone is not a verdict on a person's discipline.

You are not being asked to give something up, and God has never once handed a person a restriction where an invitation would do. The passage speaks stillness over an environment that was genuinely loud, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes ten unclaimed minutes into something rather than nothing.

You have been getting through your own evenings for a long time, and nobody has ever suggested there was another option. Psalm 46 is written in the middle of upheaval rather than in a calm season, and the Holy Spirit is the one who meets a person in the loud version of a week.

Take the bowl outside

Here is the practical part, and the location matters more than the rule.

Make the bowl. Then put the phone in another room, physically, not face down on the counter, and take the bowl outside if there is anywhere outside to sit, or to a window if there is not.

Ten minutes. Eat it slowly. Look at whatever is out there.

The reason it has to be outside or at a window is that a counter with a phone in another room is a test of willpower, and a step or a window is a change of scene, and a change of scene does most of the work that willpower would otherwise have to do.

And if the day catches up while you are sitting there, let it. That is what the ten minutes are for. A day that gets thought about for ten minutes on a step is a day that has been dealt with, and one that never gets thought about at all just moves to the following week.

You are allowed to be still for ten minutes, and God has never once made a person earn a quiet part of their own day. Psalm 46:10 hands over stillness as the way into knowing rather than as an achievement, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a step and a bowl into that.