Not Worth Dirtying a Pot For

Tonight we are making a one pot rice and vegetable pilaf, and the whole design of it is that there is exactly one thing to wash.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. In a pot with a lid, cook a chopped onion in oil for six minutes with salt. Add whatever firm vegetables are in the house, chopped small, carrot or pepper or the last of a cabbage, and cook them five minutes more. Add two cloves of chopped garlic and a big spoon of any spice you like, cumin or curry powder or just black pepper, and stir it for a minute. Add a cup of rice and coat every grain in the oil. Pour in two cups of water or broth, salt it properly, and bring it up. Lid on, lowest heat, eighteen minutes, do not lift it. Then off the heat, still covered, for five. Fork it through with anything green and squeeze lemon over the top. It feeds two, or one person tonight and again tomorrow, it costs about a dollar, and it is one pot and a fork.

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

It is the arithmetic you have been doing.

It goes like this. If I cook properly there will be a pot and a board and a knife and a plate, and then I will be standing at the sink at eight o'clock cleaning up after myself, alone, and that is fifteen minutes of my evening, and it is not worth it for one person.

So you eat around the edges of your own kitchen instead. Toast. Crackers and cheese. Something from a packet. And none of it is bad and none of it is a crisis, and all of it is the result of an arithmetic in which you appear as a cost.

The verse about being counted

There is a line of Jesus that people use for comfort and that is actually about accounting.

Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. (Matthew 10:31, King James Version)

Look at the argument He is making. He has just pointed out that a sparrow, which was sold two for a penny, does not fall to the ground without the Father knowing. And then He does the arithmetic out loud, in front of everybody, and puts a person above many of those.

That is a valuation, said plainly, by somebody entitled to make it.

And here is why it matters in a kitchen. You have also been doing a valuation. Every evening, at about half past six, you work out whether you are worth fifteen minutes at a sink, and you keep arriving at no. And there is a valuation on record that disagrees with yours.

You have been valued out loud by somebody entitled to do it, and God has never once priced a person's dinner by who else was eating it. Matthew 10:31 makes the worth of a person an explicit statement rather than a feeling, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a valuation like that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at six thirty.

You are not a cost in your own house, and heaven has never once run the arithmetic the way you have been running it. It is written that ye are of more value than many sparrows, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the onion is softening.

The dishes are not the problem

Now let me say something practical, because part of this genuinely is about dishes and part of it is not, and it helps to separate them.

The part that is about dishes is solvable. Cook something that uses one pot. Salt the water in the pot before the rice goes in and there is nothing to drain. Use the same spoon to stir and to serve. That is a real answer to a real problem and it takes the fifteen minutes down to four.

The part that is not about dishes is the sentence: it is not worth it for one person. And no amount of one pot cooking touches that sentence, because the sentence is not about effort. It is about who the effort is for.

You are the reason it is worth doing, and God has never once counted a woman's own dinner as an expense. Scripture puts it plainly in Matthew 10:31, and the Holy Spirit carries it further than a page can: a valuation stated out loud by somebody entitled to state it.

So I want to name it plainly. Cooking for one person is not a cost with no return. The person eating it is the return.

A sink full of dishes is not the price of being worth feeding.

You are the reason it is worth doing, and God has never once counted a woman's own dinner as an expense. The passage sets a person's value above the things God already attends to, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves somebody from the cost column into the reason column.

You have been feeding other people well for years and it never once occurred to you to ask whether they were worth the dishes. Matthew 10 is Jesus talking to people who were about to be badly treated and reminding them what they were worth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the same in a small kitchen on a Tuesday.

Wash the one pot slowly

Here is the practical part, and there are two halves, and the second one is the actual point.

The first half is the pilaf. One pot, no draining, one spoon. Eighteen minutes with the lid on that ask nothing of anybody.

The second half is this. After you eat, wash the one pot, and do it slowly, and do not put the radio on to get through it.

Because there is a version of the dishes that is a punishment at the end of an evening, and there is a version that is the last four minutes of a meal you made for yourself, and they involve exactly the same movements. The difference is entirely in whether the person doing it counts as somebody who was fed.

You made yourself dinner. You sat down. Now you are washing one pot. That is not a chore attached to a mistake, that is the ordinary end of a good evening.

You are allowed to enjoy the end of your own meal, and God has never once made the clearing up the price of the eating. Matthew 10:31 lands as a settled valuation rather than as an argument to win, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes four minutes at a sink into the last part of something good.