Three Phone Calls Before Breakfast

The kettle is on and it is ten past seven and Ruben is on the phone to his aunt.

She has already told him. She told him ninety seconds ago, kindly, while she was doing something else, and he has heard the answer and is still on the line, working the question around from another side, because he is not really asking about bread.

He has been up since six. He made the bed the way he was taught. He has a list on the back of an envelope and the first thing on it is the store, and the store is four minutes away, and it opens at eight. This is the third call. His brother was first, at twenty past six, which was too early and his brother said so, warmly. Then his cousin, who laughed at him and said get whichever one, hermano, and hung up because her children were shouting. Now his aunt, who is being patient with him because she loves him and because she can hear something in his voice that is not about bread.

Here is the thing that is happening in that kitchen, and it is not what it looks like.

Until this year, every decision made at Ruben's table was made by somebody older than him. That was the arrangement his whole life ran on. What went in the pot, what time the door was locked, which job was taken, which coat was worn. He did not choose, and he did not have to defend a choice, and it was not a good arrangement, and he would not go back to it for anything.

But it had one thing in it that this kitchen does not have. Somebody said afterward whether it was right. That is what has gone missing. Not the freedom, which he has, and knows he has, and thanks God for. The verdict. He could always find out where he stood. Now he stands in his own kitchen with steam on the window and no one on earth is going to ring him back at nine and tell him the bread was the correct bread.

So he makes three calls before breakfast, and none of them are about bread, and all of them are the same question: tell me I have not got this wrong.

You are the one with the phone in your hand.

I am not going to reconstruct your life for you, and I am not going to tell you which relative to stop calling, because that is not mine and it is not the point. But you know the feeling of a small ordinary choice going enormous in your hands at seven in the morning. And you know the other thing too, the one that is harder to say, which is that some part of you misses being told. Hold on to that admission. It is not a betrayal of anything. We are going to look at it, kindly, and then we are going to look at what is actually written over a free man's morning.

What actually went missing

Let me name the weight before I touch it, because a man will laugh this one off in company and then stand in a kitchen with it for an hour.

It is not indecision. It is not weakness and it is nothing to be embarrassed by. It is that a whole apparatus was removed and only half of it was ever bad. The half that told you what to do was a cage, and that cage is behind you. The half that told you afterward whether you had done well was not a cage; it was a scoreboard, and you had learned to live by reading it, and nobody warned you that it would be taken down at the same time as the bars.

So there you stand in a free kitchen with nobody keeping score, and the freedom feels less like open country and more like a room with the lights off. And underneath, quieter, the sentence a man will not say out loud: I am not sure I can be trusted with my own life.

Hear the ground first, before I say a word over you. It is written in Proverbs 3, and the same Spirit who inspired it is standing in that kitchen while the kettle comes up. You are not out here without a compass, and you were never handed a freedom with nobody in it.

In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will make straight your paths.Proverbs 3:6

Read what it actually promises, because it is not what a man reaching for the phone at ten past seven is hoping for. It does not promise you a verdict in advance. It does not say you get told which loaf. It says something better and stranger: the road under a man who acknowledges God gets made straight, by God, as he walks it.

That is a promise about the path and not about your confidence. It is the difference between somebody handing you a map of a place you have never seen, and somebody laying the road down under your feet while you walk. The first leaves you responsible for reading it correctly. The second does not depend on the quality of your eyesight at all. You have a path that God Himself keeps straight, and that is Proverbs 3 and not my encouragement, and it is the Holy Spirit and not your certainty who does the straightening.

In all your ways, which includes the bread

Now look at the two words that most people skip, because they are the whole mercy of the verse for a man like Ruben. In all your ways.

Not in your important ways. Not in the decisions with weight on them. All. The word is deliberately enormous and it covers a morning with a list on the back of an envelope, and it covers the four minute walk to the store, and it covers the loaf. God said all your ways and He meant all, and His Spirit keeps the sentence from quietly shrinking down to the big decisions only. This is yours at ten past seven on an ordinary Tuesday, with no cathedral in it and no crisis in it.

And notice what acknowledging Him is and what it is not. It is not extracting a ruling. It is not standing in the aisle waiting for a feeling to arrive before your hand moves. It is a man turning toward God on his way, out loud or under his breath, and then walking on and picking one. The acknowledging happens on the move. Verse 5 tells you not to lean on your own understanding, and men like you hear that as a demand for more certainty, when it is actually a release from it: you were never asked to be sure. You were asked to lean somewhere else while you go.

You were released from the job of being right before you move, and I am not softening the verse to be kind, that is what Proverbs 3 says with its own two verses side by side, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes an ancient proverb into something a man can do at a counter.

One plain thing before we go on, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If the quiet in the new life has stopped being quiet and has gone somewhere dark, if the mornings are getting harder rather than easier, tell one human being today, and if there is any danger in it for you, reach the crisis line where you live and let a real voice stay with you. Reaching for help is not a step backward into somebody else deciding; it is one of the ordinary things a free man does.