I Grew Up With a Full Cupboard

Tonight we are making a skillet of cabbage, potatoes and butter, and I know exactly how that sounds, and I want you to make it anyway.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cut three or four potatoes into thin slices and put them in a wide pan with a generous amount of butter or oil over medium heat, with a good pinch of salt. Let them go for ten minutes, turning them a couple of times, so the edges take on some color. Cut half a head of cabbage into ribbons and pile it on top. It will look like far too much and it will collapse to a third of that. Put the lid on for five minutes so the steam softens it, then take the lid off, turn the heat up, and let it fry for another five so the cabbage catches at the edges and goes sweet. Salt again, plenty of black pepper, and vinegar or lemon over the top at the end. It feeds four, it costs about a dollar, and the caramelized edges are the whole point.

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

It is that somebody reading this grew up in a house where nobody ever counted.

There was food. Not luxury, necessarily, but abundance in the ordinary sense: a full second shelf, a freezer with things in it, a mother who never once did arithmetic in front of anybody. And now this person stands in their own kitchen, looking at a shelf with gaps in it, and what they feel is not hunger and it is not even fear.

It is the sense of having gone backward. Of having been handed something and lost it.

The verse that forbids exactly this comparison

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that reads like it was written for the sentence running in your head.

Say not thou, What is the cause that the former days were better than these? for thou dost not enquire wisely concerning this. (Ecclesiastes 7:10, King James Version)

That is not a rebuke about ingratitude. Read what it actually says. It says the question itself is badly formed. Not sinful. Unwise. It is a question that cannot produce a true answer, because it compares a remembered season to a lived one, and memory does not keep the receipts.

You are comparing your Tuesday to your mother's Tuesday, and you never once saw her Tuesday from the inside. You saw the shelf. You did not see what she did to fill it or what it cost her or what she did not say at the table.

You are measuring against a kitchen you only ever saw from a chair, and God has never once asked anybody to match a season they did not live in. Ecclesiastes 7:10 calls that comparison an unwise question rather than a moral failure, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a badly formed question out of a person's hands and hands them the evening back.

You have not gone backward, and there is no ledger in heaven where a household is scored against the one before it. It is written that this is not an inquiry made wisely, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the kitchen where the cabbage is going on.

Grief wearing the clothes of shame

Now let me say the thing I actually think is happening, because the word shame is not quite right.

What is in you is grief. Something you had is not here, and it went without a funeral, and nobody marked it. Grief with nowhere to put itself will find a costume, and the costume it reaches for most often is shame, because shame at least gives you somebody to blame, and blame feels more like control than loss does.

So the sentence in your head is I have failed to keep what I was given, when the truer sentence is I miss it, and there is nothing wrong with a person who misses it.

A thin shelf is not a verdict on the person standing in front of it. It is a description of a season, and seasons are not moral documents.

You are allowed to miss the house you came from, and God has never once counted that as ingratitude for the one you are in. The passage forbids the comparison without forbidding the ache, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person feel the loss without turning it into a charge.

You have not lost what you were actually given, and nothing that made that house what it was has been taken from you. Ecclesiastes 7 is written by a man who had everything and found the accounting empty, and the Holy Spirit is the one who separates a full cupboard from the thing you are really missing.

What you were actually given

Here is the part I would say to you if we were standing in your kitchen.

The thing that came out of that house is not the second shelf. It is knowing what a full kitchen feels like, which is the whole reason there is an ache in the room at all. Somebody raised a person who believes a table should be good. That is not nothing. That is the whole inheritance, and it is entirely intact.

And the way it shows up now is in cabbage and potatoes. It is in salting it properly and letting the edges catch instead of boiling it pale and putting it down without looking. Care is the inheritance. The shelf was only ever where the care was stored.

So cook it like your mother cooked, which was probably slower than you remember and with more butter than you would admit.

You are carrying the thing that made that house good, and it has never once been the part that costs money. Ecclesiastes 7:10 refuses to let a person rank the seasons, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary pan of cabbage taste like the place somebody came from.