I Have Not Told Them About My Hours

Tonight we are making a pot of black bean and rice soup, and it is one pot and it is very cheap.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook a chopped onion, a chopped bell pepper if you have one, and three cloves of garlic slowly in oil in a big pot until everything is soft, which is about ten minutes and is the only part that matters. Add a big spoon of cumin and stir it for a minute. Tip in two cans of black beans with their liquid, four cups of water or broth, and a good amount of salt. Bring it up, then turn it down and let it go for fifteen minutes. Take a cup of it out, mash it with a fork, and stir it back in so the whole pot thickens. Serve it over rice, and squeeze lime or vinegar over the top, because the sharp thing at the end is what makes it taste like a restaurant instead of a pot of beans. It feeds six, it costs almost nothing, and it is better the next day.

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

It is that a man is reading this whose hours got cut about five weeks ago, and who has not told anybody in his own house.

He goes out at the same time. He comes back at the same time. He has been filling the gap with something, a second thing, a longer route, sitting in the truck. And he has been quietly taking the difference out of the food, one small adjustment at a time, so that nobody would have to notice.

And he is exhausted, and not from the work.

The sentence that has a source in it

There is a line of Paul's that gets printed on things, and the important word in it is one nobody notices.

But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus. (Philippians 4:19, King James Version)

The word is according. Not out of. According to.

Paul is not saying God will send you something proportionate to what you had before. He is saying the supply is measured against His own riches, which are not affected by what happened to your hours in the slightest. Your paycheck went down. The source did not.

And notice who Paul was writing to. People who had just sent him money they could not spare. He is not writing to comfortable people. He is writing to a church that gave out of their own thin week, and he tells them the supply is measured on a different scale entirely.

You are supplied from a source that did not get cut, and God has never once tied His measure to a schedule somebody changed at your work. Philippians 4:19 says according to His riches rather than according to your last pay period, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a preposition like that arrive in a kitchen as relief.

You have not slipped out of anything, and heaven's arithmetic did not change on the day yours did. It is written that He supplies all your need according to His riches in glory, and the same Spirit who moved Paul to write it is standing in the room where the beans are going on.

What the silence is doing

Now let me talk about the silence, because that is the actual weight, and I think you know it.

The money is hard. The silence is heavier. Every meal on that table is a small performance now, because everything on it is a sentence somebody has chosen not to say, and only one person in the room is reading it.

And it gets worse over time, not better, because the longer it goes the bigger telling them feels. Five weeks is much harder to say than five days, and five months would be harder still, and none of that is because the news got worse.

Here is the thing I want to put down plainly. Cut hours are not a verdict on the man they were cut from. Somebody in an office made a decision about a schedule. That is all that happened, and every other meaning has been added since, at night, by you.

You are not the reason this happened, and God has never once read a company's decision as a judgment on the person it landed on. The passage puts the supply on God's riches and not on a man's performance, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates a payroll decision from a person's worth.

You have been protecting them all this time, and that instinct was love and not deceit. Philippians 4 is written by a man who told the truth about his own low seasons out loud rather than hiding them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an honest sentence easier to say at a table than anywhere else.

Why telling them is the practical move

Now let me be practical, because I am not asking you to confess for the good of your soul.

Telling them changes what a household can do. Right now four people are living as though nothing has changed, because nothing has been said, and every adjustment has to come out of you alone and out of the food. That is the most expensive possible arrangement.

Say it, and it becomes a shared problem, and shared problems get smaller. Somebody picks up a shift. Somebody stops the thing that costs money on a Saturday. Somebody says they never liked that anyway. And you stop being the only person carrying it, which is the part that has been costing you sleep.

And say it at the table, over food. Not in a serious room with the television off. Over a pot of beans and rice, with the lime going round, because a hard sentence lands differently when there is a bowl in front of everybody.

You are allowed to hand some of this to the people you feed, and God has never asked one person to be the whole roof. Philippians 4:19 has a whole church supplying one man rather than one man supplying himself, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a household into something that carries weight together.