The Card Says Serves Eight

Tonight we are making a half batch of chicken and rice bake, and the halving is the actual assignment.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Heat the oven to 375. In an oven dish, stir together one cup of rice, two cups of chicken broth or water with a stock cube, half a chopped onion, a good pinch of salt and whatever dried herb is in the house. Lay four chicken thighs on top, skin side up if they have skin, and salt them well. Cover the dish tightly with foil and put it in for forty minutes. Then take the foil off and give it fifteen or twenty more, until the rice has absorbed everything and the chicken is browned on top and cooked all the way through with no pink left at the bone. Let it stand for five minutes. Squeeze lemon over it. It feeds three generously, it costs a few dollars, and it is one dish to wash.

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

It is the card in the box.

It is written in somebody's handwriting, and at the top, under the name of the dish, it says serves eight. And you have cooked it that way for a long time and it was right for a long time, and it has not been right for a while now.

And you keep making the whole thing. And you eat it Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, and some of it goes in the trash on Thursday, and every single time you get the card out you look at that number and you do not change it.

Forty years of a smaller table

There is an instruction in Deuteronomy that has one word in it that matters here.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness. (Deuteronomy 8:2, King James Version)

Remember. Not preserve. Not reenact. Not keep the arrangements exactly as they were.

Israel is told to carry the memory of a forty year season with them into a completely different life, and the whole instruction assumes that the life is going to be different. Remembering is what you do with a season that has finished. It is not the same as refusing to let it finish.

You are allowed to remember it without keeping the number, and God has never once asked a person to hold a season open by force. Deuteronomy 8:2 tells a people to remember a season while they are walking out of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that difference land in a kitchen in front of a recipe box.

You have not lost anything by writing a new number, and heaven has never once stored a household's history in a quantity. It is written that they were to remember all the way He led them, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the oven is heating.

What the number is doing

Let me name what is on that card, because it is not a quantity.

That card is the last set of instructions written when the table was full. Somebody wrote eight because eight people sat down, and the number is a small piece of evidence that they did. And to write a different number under it feels, in the hand, like agreeing to something.

So the whole batch keeps getting made, and it is not because you cannot do the arithmetic. It is because the arithmetic is not the part that is hard.

A number written on a card is not a verdict on what a household is now. It is a record of what it was, and a record does not stop being true when the thing it records is over.

You are not erasing anybody by cooking for three, and God has never once tied a person's memory to a serving size. The passage separates remembering from repeating and puts them on opposite sides of a single sentence, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets a person keep the first without owing the second.

You have been keeping faith with a table, and that instinct was love and not stubbornness. Deuteronomy 8 is written to people carrying a whole era with them into a new country, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes carrying possible without dragging.

Write it in your own hand

Here is the practical part, and it is a small physical thing that I think will cost you more than it looks like it should.

Get the card out. Cook the half batch tonight, so the new amount is a thing that has actually happened rather than a theory. Then, at the bottom of the card, in your own handwriting, write: serves three.

Do not cross out the eight. That is the point. Leave the eight exactly where it is, in the handwriting it is in, and put the new number underneath it in yours.

Both numbers true. Both handwritings on one card. That is not a replacement, it is a second entry, and the card becomes a record of two seasons instead of a monument to one.

You are adding to that card rather than taking anything off it, and God has never once required a person to destroy the old thing to live in the new one. Deuteronomy 8:2 has a whole nation carrying forty years forward while walking into something else entirely, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes two numbers on one card an honest thing rather than a loss.