Four Plates and Somebody Else's Kitchen

The sausages are good. That is the part worth holding onto, because in about four minutes she is going to stop being able to taste them.

Tuesday. Four plates on a table that seats four if nobody pushes their chair back too far. Mash made with real butter because the children can tell. Her husband is asking the older one about a science thing, and the younger one is building a wall out of peas, and she has her fork in her right hand and her phone in her left, under the lip of the table, where she thinks nobody can see it. She is not doing anything wrong. She is looking at a woman she was at school with, standing in a kitchen with an island in it. The island is roughly the size of the room she is sitting in.

First mouthful, before the phone: warm, salty, the skin of the sausage splitting properly. Second mouthful, she is looking at the woman's pendant lights. Third, the woman's children in the background, in matching linen. Fourth mouthful, and it has happened. The sausage is the same sausage. Her mouth reports nothing. She is chewing, and looking, and the plate she made with her own hands has gone quiet in front of her like a radio somebody turned down.

Nobody at the table notices. That is not the sad part. The sad part is that twenty minutes ago she was fine. She was more than fine. She had a small warm kitchen and four people in it and a good supper, and then she went and stood in somebody else's kitchen for a while with her thumb, and came back hungry for a thing she had not wanted at half past five.

You know that meal. Yours may not have been sausages and it may not have been a kitchen, it may have been a holiday, a marriage, a body, a job title, a garden with a wall round it. But you know the exact moment the food went silent. You did nothing wrong to get there. You looked, the way everybody looks. And now you are sitting in front of a good plate, not hungry for it, and hungry for something you were not hungry for an hour ago.

The plate did not change

I want to be careful here, because there is a version of this that makes the woman with the island a villain, and she is not. She cooked in her kitchen and took a picture of it, which is what people do. And there is a version that makes you the villain for looking, and I will not write that one either. Looking is not greed. Wanting is not a sin. You were hungry before you picked the phone up, in the ordinary way people at a supper table are hungry, and hunger is a thing God put in a person on purpose. Scripture never once calls the appetite itself the sin, and the Holy Spirit does not shame a hungry person; He feeds one.

Here is what actually happened, and I say it gently, because I know it from the inside. The plate did not change. Your appetite moved. It walked out of your kitchen and into hers, and it started eating there, with your eyes, and a person cannot be fed by a meal they are only looking at. So you came back to your own table with a full appetite and an empty mouth, and the sausages, which were good, could not compete with a thing that was never on offer.

Comparison does not make you want more. It makes you want somewhere else. And nothing on your own plate can reach a hunger that has left the room.

David wrote a line about this, and it is the line I would put on the wall above your table if you would let me.

The LORD is my chosen portion and my cup; you hold my lot. The lines have fallen for me in pleasant places; indeed, I have a beautiful inheritance.Psalm 16:5-6

The lines are the surveyor's cords. When the land was divided among the tribes, somebody walked out with a rope and marked where one family's ground ended and the next family's began, and you got what fell inside your cords, and your cousin got what fell inside his. David is saying: I have looked at where my cords fell, and I am not looking over the fence. The portion is good. And then he says the thing underneath the thing, which is that the portion was never really the ground at all. The LORD is my portion. The plate is His and He is the plate.

You are already inside your own cords, and the ground there is good. I am not saying that as a comfort I made up; the written word says the lines fell in pleasant places, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a person able to look down at their own table and see it. He is doing that in you now, as you read, quietly, without asking you to feel anything first.

What Jesus said to a man who was looking

There is a moment on a beach, after the resurrection, that I think about more than almost any other. Jesus has just restored Peter. Three questions, three answers, feed my sheep, and then He tells Peter, plainly, how Peter's own life is going to end. It is a heavy word and a holy one. And what does Peter do with it? He turns round and sees John walking behind them, and he says: Lord, what about him?

He looked. That is all he did. He was standing in the biggest moment of his life, and his eyes went sideways to somebody else's portion.

And Jesus did not scold the looking. Read it again if you need to. He did not say how dare you. He said, what is that to you? You follow me (John 21:22). It is not a rebuke. It is a hand on the chin, turning a face back to the plate.

You have a portion that is yours by name, and it was measured out by Someone who knew you when He measured. Scripture says He holds your lot, holds it, in His hand, and His Spirit is the one who quiets an appetite that has wandered off to a stranger's kitchen and walks it home. Not by shaming it. By feeding it.

That is the whole difference between what the world does with envy and what God does with it. The world says stop looking, which nobody has ever managed. God says look here, and sets something down.

I know the argument that starts up in a person about now, because it starts up in me. But her portion really is bigger. Maybe. I do not know her, and neither do you, not really, not from a picture. But suppose it is. Suppose the island is real and the linen children are real and the light really does fall like that in her kitchen at six o'clock. What is that to you? You have a plate. It is in front of you. He put it there. And you have not tasted it since the fourth mouthful.

You were never asked to want less. You were asked to eat what is yours. That is not my thought; it is what the word does in Psalm 16: it does not shrink the appetite, it sits it down at the right table, and the Holy Spirit does the sitting down. He is not correcting your hunger; He is aiming it.