I Eat Standing at the Stove While It Is Still Hot

You could not tell anybody when you last sat down to your own dinner, because there is no last time. There is just the arrangement.

The arrangement is this. You cook. You plate up for whoever is here, and it varies now: some nights it is him, some nights it is your son and whoever he has brought, some nights it is nobody. You carry those through. And then you stand at the stove with the pan and a fork and you eat yours out of it while it is still hot, because that is efficient, and because by then you are not really hungry in the way that makes a person want a plate.

Then you wash the pan while the others are still eating, because that pan is the worst one and it is better done hot.

Fifty-odd years of this. Your mother did the same. You have never once thought about it as anything other than how a kitchen runs.

Your daughter-in-law noticed in the spring. She said, quite carefully, that she had never seen you sit down at that table with food in front of you.

You laughed it off, and you meant to forget it, and you have thought about it about twice a week since.

Not because you feel hard done by. You do not. You would do all of it again and you would not change the way it was done.

It is more that she said a true thing and you have not been able to make it fit anywhere.

Somebody is described as preparing a table for you

Come and sit on that stool a minute while it simmers. I am not going to tell you that fifty years were a mistake.

Let me say a true thing first, and Scripture holds me to it and the Spirit will not have me being clever with a woman who has fed people her whole life. What you did was love, in an unglamorous, load bearing, entirely reliable form, and it fed a great many people, and it is not a symptom of anything. Nobody in this kitchen is on trial and neither is your mother.

Now come and look at a line everybody can quote and almost nobody applies to themselves.

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.Psalm 23:5

Read who is doing the work in that sentence. Thou preparest. God is the cook. God is the one laying it out. And the person in the psalm is not helping, not carrying anything through, not standing at the pot. That person is sitting down, in front of a table somebody else prepared, with oil on their head and a cup that has been overfilled by somebody who was not being careful about the amount.

There is no version of that verse in which the guest is also the kitchen.

You are the one that table is prepared for, and God has been laying it for you the whole time you were laying one for everybody else. That is not me making a fuss of a woman with a fork in a pan. That is what is written, and who the psalm says does the preparing and who it is prepared for, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes something that old and lays it in a kitchen while something is simmering.

Here is what nobody explains about saying a word over your own food. When you speak over your own plate, you are not making a claim about yourself and you are not asking for special treatment. You are agreeing out loud with what God has already said about His own provision, and you are including yourself in the sentence, which you have been leaving out for fifty years. Your mouth is a door. God is the one coming through it.

A blessing over your own dinner is not a fuss, and there was never a rule that the one who serves eats differently. Scripture says nothing is to be refused if it be received with thanksgiving (1 Timothy 4:4), and there is no clause in it about who did the cooking, and the Spirit is the one who makes that live in a kitchen rather than merely be true on a page.

Why the pan is easier than the plate

Now let me name it gently, because I think you already know it and have not had a word for it.

A plate is a claim. A plate says this portion is mine and I am going to sit down with it in front of everybody and take as long as they take. The pan asks for nothing. The pan can be abandoned when somebody needs more gravy. The pan does not require anybody to wait for you or to notice you or to keep you company.

Fifty years of a pan is not efficiency. It is a woman arranging things so that she never has to be the one being served.

That is not a fault in you and I will not call it one. It is what a whole generation of women were taught and it built more than anybody has ever thanked them for. And what is written never once required a woman to have finished serving before she could be seated. The Spirit is not asking you to stop cooking. He is asking you to accept one plate.

God has never once seen you as the kitchen, and He has been preparing something for you since long before that stove was put in. It is written that He satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness (Psalm 107:9), and the same Spirit who breathed that line is in this room while the pan is on, which is why it reads as an arrangement already made and not as a compliment.

Hear what I am not doing. I am not telling you to stop feeding people, or to make a point at Sunday dinner, or to say anything at all to your daughter-in-law about the spring. Nothing here is a stand and nothing here is graded. If you eat out of the pan again on Thursday, nothing is lost.

What you say over your own plate is a real thing, whether the house is full or empty. God's word does not come back to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11), and the Spirit is the one carrying it, and a woman saying seven words over her own dinner in her own kitchen is not making a fuss of herself. She is agreeing with a psalm.