Standing in Your Own Kitchen at Six

The fridge has been open long enough that the little motor at the back has kicked in, and the cold is coming out over her feet.

Eggs. Half a red cabbage in a bag. Cheese. Two chicken thighs on a plate with plastic wrap over them. A jar of something with three spoonfuls left in it that ought to be thrown out and has survived four inspections already. Butter. Milk. A bag of rice in the cupboard above, and a can of red beans behind it that she has been meaning to do something with for a month. On the shelf below, a bag of new potatoes she bought on Saturday because they looked good, and they did look good, and she has thought about them every day since without once deciding what they are for.

It is ten past six. It is her kitchen. She pays for it, she cleaned it this morning, and the pan she would use is hanging on the hook where she put it. Nothing in this room is anybody else's.

And she is standing in the light of an open fridge with her hand on the door, and she cannot pick.

It is not that nothing appeals. That would be simpler. It is that the question what do I want for dinner arrives in her head and finds no machinery there to answer it. For twenty years the answer to that question was decided somewhere else and came to her finished: this is what we are having, this is when we are having it, this is what you like. She got very good at the part that came after the deciding. She never once had to do the deciding, and a thing you have not done in twenty years is not a thing you can simply start doing at ten past six on a Wednesday because the fridge is yours now.

So she does what she has done most evenings since she moved in. She stands there until the cold air on her ankles gets uncomfortable, and then she shuts the door, and she has toast.

And she is not unhappy. That is the part nobody would guess from outside. She is genuinely glad. She wanted this kitchen and she loves this kitchen and she would not go back for anything on earth. It is just that freedom turned out to have a floor she did not know about, and the floor is made of a thousand small decisions a day, and nobody warned her that the small ones would be the hard ones. She was ready for lonely. She was not ready for what do you want.

You are the one at the fridge. Maybe for you it is dinner and maybe it is the radio station, or the paint color, or a Saturday with nothing in it that you spend cleaning because at least cleaning knows what it is doing. There is no shame anywhere in this and I want that said before anything else. A muscle you were never allowed to use is not a weak muscle. It is an unused one, and those are different things, and only one of them is anybody's fault, and it is not this one.

Here is what I have come to put in your hands, and we will take it slowly. There is no examiner in that kitchen. There never was. What is in there with you is a Teacher, and He has been waiting to be asked about the potatoes.

The muscle that was never yours to use

Let me say plainly what is happening at that fridge, because the usual explanation is wrong and it is unkind.

The usual explanation is indecisiveness, which is a word people use about a personality. This is not a personality. Deciding is a practice, like handwriting or a language, and a practice runs on repetition. For twenty years that particular practice belonged to somebody else, so there is no worn path in you where the deciding goes, and standing in the cold air waiting for one to appear is not going to make one. That is not weakness. It is arithmetic.

And underneath the arithmetic is the thing that actually keeps the door open, which is not confusion at all. It is a quiet certainty that somewhere there is a right answer to what is for dinner, and that getting it wrong will cost something. Nobody is charging anything. Nobody is watching the pan. But the body remembers a room in which small things were graded, and it stands very still.

So hear who is actually in the kitchen with you, and hear it from the word before you hear it from me.

I will instruct you and teach you in the way you should go; I will counsel you with my eye upon you.Psalm 32:8

Every verb in that verse is a teacher's verb. Instruct. Teach. Counsel. Not test, not assess, not permit. And then that last phrase, which is the one I would like you to carry out of here: with my eye upon you. An examiner's eye on you means you are being marked. A teacher's eye on you means somebody is there while you try it. Same eye, entirely different room. Psalm 32 says the eye belongs to the One who instructs, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an old promise about a way to walk and puts it down beside a fridge at ten past six. You are being taught, not tested, and the difference was settled long before you had a kitchen of your own.

Read the shape of it once more, because it is the whole freedom in one line. He does not say I will tell you what to have. He says I will teach you the way to go, and teaching assumes the learner does the walking. God has no intention of becoming the next voice that hands you your dinner finished.

His eye on you is not a mark scheme

Now the second thing, and it is the one that makes the first thing liveable.

Somewhere in you there is a sum that says asking for help with something this small would be embarrassing. Big things, yes. Illness, work, the children. But the potatoes? You cannot take the potatoes to God. That sum is doing you real harm and Scripture will not have it.

James 1 says that if anybody lacks wisdom they should ask God, who gives generously to all without reproach. Without reproach. Not a sigh, not a raised eyebrow, not a note kept about how often you needed asking. That is not my reading of His character, it is the phrase the Spirit had written down, and the same Spirit is the one who makes generously into something you can actually lean on at a kitchen counter. You have a source of wisdom that has never once made a person feel small for using it.

And there is a wideness in this that the fear keeps hiding from you. Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom (2 Corinthians 3:17). Freedom, in the room, in the ordinary hour, in the deciding. Not freedom as a status you hold and never spend. This is yours in the small hours of an evening, in what goes in the pan and what goes on the radio, and the Spirit of the Lord standing in a kitchen makes that a free room rather than an exam hall.

Which means the potatoes are not too small. That is the thing I most want you to hear. A Teacher who counsels with His eye on you is interested in the exact size of decision you are actually facing, and the size you are actually facing this evening is dinner. Take Him the dinner. There is no minimum.

And plainly, before we go on, because I would rather say it and turn out to be unnecessary. If the standing still has spread, if most nights are toast now and the days have started closing in, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger around you, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Letting somebody in is one of the ordinary things a free person does, and it is a decision too, and it counts.