Two of the Eight Came

Tonight we are making a big pot of lentil and rice pilaf with fried onions on top, and it is the dish I would cook for eight or for two without changing a thing.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Slice two onions thin and fry them in a generous amount of oil in a wide pot over medium heat for about fifteen minutes, past the point where you would normally stop, until they are deep brown and sweet. Lift half of them out onto a plate and salt them. To the pot, add a cup of brown or green lentils and four cups of water, and simmer for twenty minutes until they are nearly tender. Add a cup and a half of rice, a big spoon of cumin, a pinch of cinnamon and plenty of salt, plus another cup of water. Lid on, lowest heat, twenty minutes, do not lift it. Rest it off the heat for five. Pile the reserved onions on top. It feeds eight or it feeds two for four days, it costs a few dollars, and it is genuinely one of the best cheap dishes there is.

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

It is that six people did not come.

You asked eight. You cooked for eight. And two arrived, and they were good company, and you talked and laughed and the evening was, by any honest measure, a good one.

And you were not entirely in it. There was a second conversation running the whole time, underneath the first, and it was about the six. What they were doing. Whether they had forgotten. Whether it had been you.

And now they have gone home and there is a great deal of food and you are standing in a quiet kitchen.

Paul had exactly this evening

There is a sentence near the end of Second Timothy that is one of the loneliest lines Paul ever wrote, and one of the most useful.

At my first answer no man stood with me, but all men forsook me: I pray God that it may not be laid to their charge. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me, and strengthened me. (2 Timothy 4:16, King James Version)

Read the two halves. Nobody came, and he says so plainly rather than covering it. And then he asks that it not be held against them, which is a remarkable thing to write about people who left you standing.

And then the turn, which is the part I want you to have. Notwithstanding the Lord stood with me. The room was emptier than it should have been, and it was not empty.

You were not standing in that room on your own, and God has never once counted a gathering by the people who stayed away. Second Timothy 4:16 has Paul say plainly that nobody came and then say who did, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at ten at night.

You have not been let down in any way heaven overlooked, and there is nothing about tonight that went unnoticed. It is written that the Lord stood with him and strengthened him, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the pot is resting.

Where you actually were all evening

Now let me name what happened to your evening, because it is worth saying precisely.

The two people who came got a good host. Warm, funny, well fed. But part of the evening was spent in a room that did not exist, at a table with six empty chairs, doing an arithmetic nobody else in the house was doing.

And that is the real cost of the night. Not the food. The being somewhere else while good people were in the room.

A gathering of two is not a verdict on the person who invited eight. It is two people who wanted to be there, which is a completely different fact and a much better one.

You are allowed to be fully present with whoever came, and God has never once required a full room before He would call it a table. The passage has Paul name the absence and then move straight to who was actually with him, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a person out of the empty chairs and into the room they are standing in.

You have been dividing your attention between two friends and six absences, and only one of those groups was in the house. Second Timothy 4 is written by a man who chose not to prosecute the people who did not turn up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that generosity possible on the night rather than years later.

What to do with the food

Here is the practical part, and it is about the pot rather than the feelings.

There is a lot of food. And there are two ways to deal with it, and one of them is going to keep the evening going in your head for another week.

The first way is to eat it, alone, for four days, and to think about the six every time. That is what will happen by default, because that is the path of least resistance.

You have something in your hands that feeds people this week, and food made in good faith has never once been wasted. Second Timothy 4:16 has a man strengthened in the exact room that emptied out, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns a surplus into somebody else's Tuesday.

The second way is to give it away tomorrow. Take a container to somebody. A neighbor, a person at work, anybody at all. Not as a rescue operation for the food, but because a pot of good pilaf that reaches four more people has landed where a pot of food is supposed to land.

That single act closes the night. The six did not come and the food went out anyway, and the arithmetic is finished.

You are holding something that is going to feed people this week, and God has never once wasted what was made in good faith. Second Timothy 4:16 has a man in an emptier room than he expected receive strength for what came next, and the Spirit of God is the one who turns a surplus into somebody else's Tuesday.