I Eat in Bed With the Lights Off

Tonight we are making a skillet of eggs and beans with tortillas, and it takes about ten minutes and uses one pan.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Warm a good spoon of oil in a pan over medium heat and cook half a chopped onion for four minutes with salt. Add a can of black beans, drained, and a spoon of cumin, and let it sizzle for three minutes, mashing about a third of the beans against the pan so they hold together. Push everything to one side, add a little more oil, and crack in two eggs. Cook them until the whites are completely set and firm with nothing runny left. Warm two tortillas in a dry pan for thirty seconds each side, or over the flame if you have gas and are careful. Put it all on a plate with hot sauce and anything green. It feeds one person very well, it costs about a dollar fifty, and it is one pan.

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

It is where you eat it.

You take it into the bedroom. Not always, but almost always. The plate goes on the bed or on the floor beside it, and something plays on the screen, and you eat without really looking at the food, and afterward the plate stays there until morning.

And nobody has ever told you this is a problem, because it is not exactly a problem. You are not unhappy. You have a job and friends and a life that is basically working.

It is just that you have never once, in this apartment, eaten a meal at a table with nothing else happening. And a small thing has been growing in the gap, and it does not have a name yet.

The verse that counts how often God thinks about a person

There is a line in Psalm 139 that is doing arithmetic, and the arithmetic is the comfort.

How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them! (Psalm 139:17, King James Version)

Read what he is astonished by. Not that God has a thought about him. That the number of them is beyond counting.

And the psalm around it is entirely about being known in specific physical detail: sitting down, standing up, lying down, the words in the mouth before they are said. It is a psalm about somebody being tracked with attention through the completely ordinary parts of a day.

Which includes a small apartment at eight in the evening with a plate on a bed.

You are thought about more often than you could count, and God has never once lost track of somebody in a one bedroom apartment. Psalm 139:17 makes the sheer number of God's thoughts toward a person the thing worth marveling at, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a room with a screen on.

You have not gone unnoticed in this city, and heaven has never once needed a person to be doing something significant to be attended to. It is written that how great is the sum of them, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the beans are going in the pan.

What eating in bed is actually doing

Now let me name what is happening, because there is nothing wrong with you and something is genuinely going on.

Eating in bed with a screen means the meal never becomes an event. It happens in the background of something else. And that is fine on any given night and it is the norm for most people your age and it is not a moral failure.

But over months it removes the only reliable pause in a day that otherwise runs from work to screen to sleep. There is nothing in that day that stops. And a day with no stop in it makes a person feel vaguely thin in a way they cannot trace to a cause.

You are thought about more often than anybody could count, and God has never once lost track of a person in a rented room. Psalm 139:17 marvels at the sheer number of them rather than at the fact of one, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that arithmetic land at a small table.

And the second thing is this. Eating alone in a bed is different from eating alone at a table. One of them is being on your own. The other, over time, starts to feel like hiding, even when nobody is hiding from anything.

Eating in bed is not a verdict on how a person is doing.

You are not doing this wrong, and God has never once graded a young person on how their evenings look. The passage attends to somebody through the ordinary physical details of a day rather than through any achievement, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes shame out of an evening that nobody else can see.

You have been living without a single pause in your day, and no one has mentioned it because nobody is there. Psalm 139 is written about being known in the small movements of an ordinary life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in exactly those movements.

Eat one meal at a table with the light on

Here is the practical part, and it is one meal rather than a rule.

Tonight, put it on a plate and eat it somewhere that is not the bed. A table if there is one. A chair and a windowsill if there is not. A box, honestly, if that is what the apartment has.

Put the light on properly rather than the low one. Open the window if it is warm. Put the phone face down or in another room, and eat the whole thing with nothing else running.

You are having an evening rather than getting through one, and God has never once made company the condition of a day counting. The Spirit of God is saying it as plainly as Psalm 139 says it: a person known in the sitting down and the standing up and every ordinary movement between.

It will feel long. Ten minutes with no screen feels like twenty five the first few times, and that stretched feeling is exactly the pause that has been missing, arriving all at once.

And then take the plate to the sink afterward, tonight, which is the small thing that stops the evening leaking into the morning.

You are allowed one deliberate pause in your own day, and God has never once required a person to have company before their evening could count. Psalm 139:17 makes attention rather than achievement the thing that fills the record, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes ten minutes at a table into a day that has a middle in it.