I Said No Again and It Was Only Cereal

Tonight we are making pancakes for dinner, and I want to be clear that this is not a treat, it is a meal.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. In a bowl, mix a cup and a half of flour, two spoons of sugar, a big spoon of baking powder and a good pinch of salt. In a mug, beat one egg into a cup and a quarter of milk with a spoon of oil or melted butter. Pour the wet into the dry and stir until it is only just combined, because lumps are correct and overmixing is the one thing that makes a bad pancake. Let the batter sit for five minutes while a pan heats over medium heat with a little butter. Pour rounds in, wait until bubbles come up through the middle and the edges look dry, then flip once and give it another minute so the middle is cooked all the way through. Keep them warm in a low oven. It feeds four, it costs almost nothing, and children will remember it.

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

It is that a parent is reading this who had a very small thing happen this week, and it has not left them.

You were in the store. A child asked for one specific thing. Not an unreasonable thing. A box of cereal with something on the front of it. And you said no. And the child said fine, or nothing at all, and put it back and moved on within four seconds, because children do.

And you did not move on. You are still in that aisle.

An old man's sentence about children

There is a line in Psalm 37 that gets used badly, and I want to hand it back to you carefully.

I have been young, and now am old; yet have I not seen the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging bread. (Psalm 37:25, King James Version)

People use that as a guarantee, and it is not one. It is a testimony. An old man is telling you what he saw over a long life, and what he saw was that God did not walk away from families.

I am not going to tell you that means your money will change. I do not know that, and people have used this verse to say that and it has hurt people. What the line actually says is something narrower and better: he watched for decades and never once saw God abandon a household.

You have not been forsaken in this, and God has never once left a family standing in an aisle on their own. Psalm 37:25 is an old man's testimony that he never saw it happen, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old man's evidence and makes it a present tense comfort in a kitchen.

You are not outside of anything, and there is no household in Scripture that God stepped away from because the money got thin. It is written that he had not seen the righteous forsaken, and the same Spirit who moved him to write it is in the room where you are cooking tonight.

Why four seconds took the whole week

Here is what I think happened in that aisle, and it is worth naming precisely.

The child asked for cereal. You heard a much longer question. You heard: can we be a family that gets the thing on the shelf. And the no you said was not about the box, it was about the whole shape of your life, and you carried it out of the store and into the car and it is still with you on Thursday.

That is why a four second exchange has cost you a week. The child was asking about breakfast. You answered a question about your worth.

And I want to say the true thing here. That no was not a verdict on the parent who said it. It was a decision made by somebody managing limited money with care, which is a competence and not a shortfall.

You have been doing the arithmetic that keeps that household fed, and God has never once counted a careful no as a failure to love. The written word puts the righteous and the seed in one sentence and keeps them both standing, and the Spirit of God is the one who separates one aisle from a whole life of provision.

You are the reason there is food in that house at all, and that has never been the small part of the story. Psalm 37 is written by a man reporting what he actually watched happen in families, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a parent hear their own record read back to them.

What the child will actually remember

Now let me tell you something about children that I believe is true and that I have watched.

Children do not remember the boxes. They remember the evenings.

They remember pancakes for dinner on a Tuesday because that was funny and slightly wrong and their parent laughed. They remember being allowed to pour the batter and making one enormous misshapen one. They remember the smell of a kitchen and who was in it.

You are giving them something that outlasts a shopping list, and the part that lasts has never once had a price on it. The Spirit of God is not quiet about this: Psalm 37:25 measures a whole life in households rather than in purchases, and He is saying it over a kitchen tonight.

None of that costs anything. That is the part I want you to hear. The thing that goes into their long memory is almost entirely free, and it is made of attention, and attention is exactly the thing shame steals first. When you feel bad about what you cannot give, you go quiet and you hurry, and the hurrying costs them far more than the cereal ever would.

So make the pancakes badly and slowly and let them help.

You are giving them the part that lasts, and the part that lasts has never once been the part that costs money. Psalm 37:25 is an old man measuring a life in households rather than in purchases, and the Spirit of God is the one who slows a parent down enough to enjoy an ordinary Tuesday.