Sunday Dinner for Two Fewer

The big pot is out. It only comes out on Sundays and it has a dent in the lid from a night nobody remembers anymore, and it is on the back burner at twenty to four the way it has been on the back burner at twenty to four for eleven years.

He is standing at the counter with the bag of rice open and a coffee cup in his hand.

The coffee cup is the measure. It is not a measuring cup, it has never been a measuring cup, it is a white cup with a chip out of the rim, and the amount has always been seven cups and a bit for luck. His hands know seven. His hands could do seven in the dark, talking to somebody, with the radio on.

He stands there for a while.

Then he puts in five.

Five is wrong in his hands. Five comes out of the bag in a thin sound instead of the sound seven makes. He tips the cup and watches it go in and his arm does not believe any of it.

He already shopped for eight yesterday, because habit did the shopping and habit had not been told. There is too much of everything in the refrigerator now, sitting there being an accusation, and he is going to have to look at it every day this week.

And he set the table first, the way he always does, before anything goes on the heat. Counted the plates out without thinking. Then stood holding two of them.

He put those two back in the cupboard very carefully, the way you put something down when it is hot.

Then he went back to the stove, because the sofrito was catching, and he stirred it with the wooden spoon that has a burnt handle, and he did not cry, and that surprised him a little.

You know this kitchen. Maybe yours is a coffee order you still say out of habit and then have to un-say. A second toothbrush. A group message with a name in it that nobody has had the nerve to remove. A car with a seat still slid forward for legs that are not going to be in it. Somewhere in the last few weeks the number changed, and your hands have not caught up, and every ordinary object in your house has quietly become an arithmetic problem.

Hear me first. This is not a failure of faith. Not the five cups, not the shopping, not the fact that you are functioning well enough to make dinner. And I am not going to tell you what your loss was for. People will try. Some of them will do it kindly and some of them will do it with a verse, and I am not going to be one of them, because I do not know, and neither does anybody who has said it to you this week.

I am going to stand at the stove with you instead.

I change not is not a compliment

The line I want to put in your hands is one sentence long, and it was said to people who were furious.

Read around it. The book it sits in is a shouting match. The people are saying out loud that serving God is pointless and there is no profit in it. The priests are putting animals on the altar that they would be embarrassed to hand a local official. Everybody in the story is disappointed and most of them are behaving badly about it, and into that room God says this:

For I am the LORD, I change not; therefore ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.Malachi 3:6

Look at the word in the middle. Therefore. It is not a decoration. It is a hinge, and the whole weight of the sentence hangs on it. The unchanging is the reason there is anybody left to argue with Him.

You have something still in this kitchen that was never on the table, and it is the reason there is still a table. That is not my sentiment about your Sunday: Malachi 3:6 makes His not changing the cause and their not being consumed the effect, in that order, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a cause and effect from a book carry actual weight in a man standing at a stove.

And notice what He calls them. Sons of Jacob. Not sons of Israel, which was the better name, the new one, the one given at the river after the fight. He reaches past that and uses the old one. Jacob. The heel grabber. The one who got the blessing by lying to a blind man.

He names them by their worst and then, in the same breath, says that is exactly who is not being consumed.

You were not kept because you were at your best, and you are not being kept now because you are handling this well. What is written puts the keeping on His character rather than on theirs, and it is His Spirit, not your composure at the counter, who makes that hold true on a Sunday when your hands are measuring wrong.

What was on the table and what the table stood on

Here is the thing I am not going to do, and I want you to know I am not doing it, because everybody else has.

I am not going to count up what you still have. That is an audit, and an audit at a moment like this is a cruelty with good manners on. Nobody standing at a stove with two plates back in the cupboard needs a list of the plates that are still out.

What I want to say is smaller and it is different.

The two who are missing were on the table. They were real, they were counted, they belonged there, and the space is a real space and I am not going to talk you out of feeling it.

But the thing that was actually holding your house up was never one of the items on the table.

You have a floor under this kitchen that the last few weeks did not touch, and it is under your feet while you stir. Scripture says the LORD does not change, which is a claim about His nature and not about His mood, and the Spirit of God is the one who presses a claim like that down into a man's chest until it stops being a nice idea.

That word for change is not about somebody having an off day. It is about a thing altering what it fundamentally is. God does not have a bad news version of Himself that comes out on the Sundays when the number is down. There is no other Him waiting in the wings for the years that go badly.

You are dealing with the same God this Sunday that you were dealing with in every good Sunday before it, and He was never the part that got smaller. What is written promised that unchanging nature as the very ground of anybody surviving anything, and the same Spirit who moved on a furious, disappointed people in Malachi is in this kitchen, at the stove, at twenty to four.