I Eat Because It Is the Hour

Tonight we are making a pot of lentil soup with lemon, and the lemon at the end is not a garnish, it is what wakes the whole thing up.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook a chopped onion, a chopped carrot and a stick of celery in olive oil in a pot for eight minutes with salt. Add two cloves of chopped garlic and a big spoon of cumin for a minute. Add a cup of red or brown lentils, rinsed, a can of chopped tomatoes and five cups of water. Bring it up, skim anything that foams, then let it go gently for thirty minutes until the lentils have collapsed and thickened the whole pot. Salt it properly at the end, because lentils take more salt than people expect. Then squeeze in half a lemon and stir, and taste it before and after so you can feel what the lemon does. Bread on the side, and good olive oil over the top of each bowl. It feeds six, it costs about two dollars, and it is better the next day.

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

It is the clock.

You eat at six. Not because you are hungry at six. Because six is when a person eats, and you are a person, and so at six you make something and eat it and put the plate in the sink.

And if somebody asked you whether you were hungry beforehand, you would have to think about it, and the honest answer most evenings is that you do not know. The signal is not really arriving any more. There is just the hour, and the habit, and the plate.

And that is not an emergency. But it means that food, which is one of the small daily good things a person gets, has quietly become a piece of maintenance, like putting the trash out.

The verse about what a person actually lives on

There is a line in Deuteronomy that people quote in one direction and that points in two.

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live. (Deuteronomy 8:3, King James Version)

People use that line to say that food is not the important thing. But read the whole sentence and notice what God actually does in it. He lets them get hungry, and then He feeds them, and He does both on purpose.

The bread is real. He sends it every morning. The point is not that bread does not matter, it is that a person is not only being kept alive, they are being spoken to, and the manna arriving daily was itself the sentence.

You are being spoken to and not merely maintained, and God has never once fed a person as though they were an engine. Deuteronomy 8:3 has the hunger and the feeding both arranged deliberately and both meaning something, 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 reduced to mechanics, and heaven has never once treated a person's meals as maintenance. It is written that man doth not live by bread only, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the lentils are going in.

Appetite is not the same as hunger

Now let me separate two things, because I think the missing one is not the one you would name.

Hunger is a physical signal and it comes and goes and it can genuinely go flat for all sorts of ordinary reasons: a low season, a lot of sitting, a stretch of poor sleep, or simply age.

Appetite is different. Appetite is anticipation. It is the part of a person that looks forward to something, and it is not really about the stomach at all.

You are not ungrateful, and an appetite that has gone quiet has never once been a report on a person's heart. Scripture puts it plainly in Deuteronomy 8:3, and the Holy Spirit carries it further than a page can: God arranged both the hunger and the feeding, and He meant something by each.

And it is appetite that has gone quiet, not hunger. Which is why eating more would not fix it and why nothing on the plate has been the problem.

Appetite comes back through interest rather than through discipline. Not from deciding to want food, which is impossible, but from being in the room with something that has a bit of edge to it.

Eating without appetite is not a verdict on a person's gratitude.

You are not ungrateful, and God has never once measured a person by whether they were looking forward to dinner. The passage has God arrange both the hunger and the feeding rather than demanding an attitude, and the Spirit of God is the one who returns a thing that has gone quiet without shaming anybody about it.

You have been keeping the routine going with nothing in the tank, and that is more faithful than it feels. Deuteronomy 8 is written about a forty year stretch of ordinary days, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the mechanical out of a routine without taking the routine away.

Taste it before and after the lemon

Here is the practical part, and it is one specific act.

Make the soup. Before the lemon goes in, take a spoonful and taste it. Then squeeze the lemon in, stir, and taste it again.

That is the whole exercise, and it takes about forty seconds.

You are being spoken to and not merely kept alive, and God has never once fed anybody the way a person fuels an engine. It is written that man doth not live by bread only, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes two spoonfuls of soup into a thing worth noticing.

The reason is that the difference between those two spoonfuls is genuinely large, and noticing a difference is the smallest possible act of interest, and interest is where appetite comes back from. Not from wanting food. From noticing something.

And there is nothing spiritual required in it. You do not have to feel anything. You simply have to taste two spoonfuls and register that the second one is better.

You are being invited to notice one small thing, and God has never once required a person to manufacture an appetite before He would feed them. Deuteronomy 8:3 has the manna arriving every day as a word rather than as fuel, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes two spoonfuls of soup into the start of interest coming back.