Six Minutes Standing Up

Six minutes. He knows the number because the clock on the stove said 9:14 when he set the plate on the counter and 9:20 when he put it in the sink, and he only looked because his daughter had called a question from the other room and he was already finished by the time she came in with the rest of it.

That was not the part that got him. That part came later, out on the step with the door open behind him and the water down past the road doing its slow work in the dark, when he tried to remember the last meal that took longer than six minutes, and could not. Not this year. There had been a long one after a funeral and one at a wedding where the food came late, and neither counted, because he chose neither. Every meal he had chosen for himself in twelve months had been eaten standing up, in six minutes, with one hand, the other hand doing something else.

He sat with that a while. It is not a large sin. Nobody was harmed. There is no commandment about it and he knew there was not.

And then the second thing arrived, and that is why he was still on the step when the light went out of the sky over the water. The good thing that had come to him in the spring.

I am not going to tell you what it was. If I name it you will hold it up against yours and decide whose was the bigger, and the arithmetic will start, and the arithmetic is exactly what this page is trying to get you out of. So it stays unnamed on purpose. It was good, the kind of good he had asked for out loud with his hands over his face, and it came, and he sat in the truck afterward and could not drive for a while.

And on the step, months later, he saw what he had done with it. He had handled it the way he handles a plate. Fast. Standing up. One hand. The other hand already reaching for the next thing on the list, the eyes already going past it, the whole of it swallowed in six minutes and then the ordinary evening closing over the top like water over a dropped stone.

Not once had he sat down with it. Not once had he tasted it.

And here is the part he would not have said out loud to anyone. He did not know how. Sit down with a good thing and do what, exactly? He was a man who could carry a load a long way without complaining, and he had no idea how to receive one.

So he stayed on the step with his elbows on his knees, and the tide came up the way it does, taking its time, in no hurry to be anywhere else. And a sentence came to him that he had known since he was small and had never once obeyed.

Taste, it said. Not swallow. Taste.

Taste is the slow sense

Of everything the body can do, tasting is the one that will not be rushed.

Sight is instant. Open your eyes and the whole room is already in you. Hearing arrives before anybody decides to receive it. But taste asks for two things nothing else asks for, contact and time. The flavor is not sitting on the surface. It comes up out of a thing slowly while the thing stays on the tongue, and if you move it through fast enough you can put an entire meal into your body and report honestly that it had no taste at all. That is not a lie. There was flavor in it. You simply did not stay long enough to meet it.

Now hear which verb God chose.

O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.Psalm 34:8

Taste. Out of every word available, the slowest one. And the man who wrote it was not a man with time on his hands. David wrote that psalm out of the worst improvisation of his life, on the run, having faked madness at the gate of a foreign king to get out of the city alive. He was not resting. He was hunted. And the word he reached for is the one that cannot be done quickly.

He did not write hear about the Lord. He did not write look at Him and move on. And I want to be careful here, because this is precisely the place where somebody would swing around and start correcting you. Slow down. Learn to savor. That is not what the psalm does and it is not what I am doing. The psalm makes no remark whatever about your manners. It tells you what is on the plate. Taste and see that the Lord is good. The whole sentence is about Him.

You are invited to taste and not merely to be informed, and that invitation is standing over you tonight whatever the last twelve months of your meals looked like. I am not saying that to be kind to you. Psalm 34:8 puts the verb in the imperative, taste, spoken to people who had every reason to be hurrying, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a line written by a man running for his life and sets it down on a step at nine o'clock at night as though it had been addressed there.

And notice what the psalm does not say. It does not say taste and see whether the Lord is good, as though the tasting were the test and the verdict were pending. It says taste and see that He is. The verdict is in before you lift the fork. What is being asked of you is not an evaluation. It is a meal.

You have a mouth that God made for tasting and a God who has already called Himself good in the written word, and six minutes has never once changed either of those. That is Psalm 34:8 doing the work and none of it mine, and the Spirit is the One who makes a written line into something actually in your mouth instead of something you agree with from across the room.

He does not hand things over to be swallowed

Follow it out to the good thing that came in the spring, because that is where this lands.

There is a way of receiving that is really only processing. The thing arrives, you acknowledge it, you file it, you move. It is efficient, it is not wicked, and it leaves you exactly as hungry as before, because nothing moving at that speed touches the sides.

God has never once handed anything over on those terms. Look at how He fed His people in the desert. The bread came down in the morning, an omer each, gathered that day and eaten that day, and what anyone tried to hold over went bad by morning. People read that as a lesson about hoarding. Read it the other way. It is a lesson about pace. He built the whole arrangement so that nobody could get out ahead of the eating.

And then there is the thing Jesus did on the hillside that almost nobody notices, because we are all looking at the loaves.

Before a single mouthful of anything, He made them sit down. Matthew 14:19 says He commanded the multitude to sit down on the grass, and Mark has Him putting them in companies on the green grass, in ranks, the way a family is put at a table. Five thousand men with their households, hungry, out of food, at the end of a long day, and the first act of the miracle was seating. He would not feed a crowd standing up.

You are among a seated people, because the One who broke the bread on that hillside sat everybody down first and He has not changed His method since. Matthew 14:19 carries the command plainly, and the Holy Spirit is the One who takes a hillside that emptied out two thousand years ago and pulls a chair out with it in a kitchen tonight.

So think again about the spring, and be gentle about it, because I am not building toward an accusation. You were handed that good thing to be tasted and never to be gotten through, and the giving of it was no test of how fast you could handle it. Nobody is grading the receiving. His word says every good gift comes down from the Father of lights, a gift and not an assignment, and the Spirit who carried it to your door is not standing behind you with a clipboard, timing you.

Here is the quiet mercy in it. The thing is not spoiled. You did not use up your one chance at it by swallowing it in six minutes. It is still yours, He is still the One who gave it, and it can be tasted late. There is no window that closed behind you.