Two Forks and the Card by the Kettle

The card is still propped against the kettle where his wife stood it on Wednesday, and he is eating out of the pan with a fork, standing up, and he has not tasted a mouthful.

I am not going to tell you what came on Wednesday. If I name it you will hold it up against yours and decide his was bigger or smaller, and that is exactly the arithmetic this page is trying to get you out of. It was the thing. His thing. The one he had wanted for years, the one he had prayed for in the plain way a man prays for a thing when he is a little embarrassed to be asking. And it came, and the people who love him signed a card, and there was a bottle of something opened on Wednesday night, and his wife cried a little and laughed at herself for crying.

That was Wednesday. It is Saturday. She is asleep on the sofa with the television murmuring to nobody, and he is at the counter with the pan and the fork and the card, and here is what he has caught himself doing, and it is why the food has no taste. He is already reaching. Not for anything he could name; that is what frightens him. Just the shape of reaching, the lean forward, the eyes going past the thing on the counter to the next thing, and the next, the way they always have. Four days. He got the thing he wanted for years and by the weekend the wanting was back and standing exactly where it stood before, like a dog that has followed him home.

And under the reaching, worse than the reaching: the shame of it. Everybody signed the card. What kind of a man gets the thing and is hungry again by Saturday? He puts the fork down. He looks at the pan. He picks up a second fork, for no reason he can explain, and lays it beside the first.

Perhaps that is you tonight, with your own card by your own kettle. You got it. You know exactly what yours was, and I do not, and I am not asking. And the wanting came back before the week was out, and you have concluded that the wanting is the problem, that something in you does not know how to be full, and the kindest thing anyone has said to you is to try to want less.

He did not say close your mouth

I want to say the true thing before anything else, because most people who reach this page have been told the opposite by people who meant well.

The wanting is not the sin. You are hungry, not greedy, and there is a difference, and Scripture knows it even when the people signing cards do not, and the Holy Spirit is not the one whispering greedy at you. Here is the pit, named honestly: the thing came, and it did not reach the bottom of you, and the reaching started again on Saturday, and you have taken that as evidence against yourself. As if a hungry man who is still hungry after a mouthful has bad manners. He does not. He has a hunger bigger than the mouthful. That is not a verdict on him. It is a measurement.

Now listen to what God said to His own people, in a psalm, in His own voice, at the exact place where a lesser god would have told them to calm down.

I am the Lord your God, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt. Open your mouth wide, and I will fill it.Psalm 81:10

Open your mouth wide. Not narrower. Not close it and be grateful for what you had on Wednesday. Wide. He is the one saying it, and He says it to a people who had spent their whole history foraging, and He does not correct the appetite. He claims it. He says: point that hunger here, open it further than you have ever dared, and I will fill it.

You are wanted at a table where the instruction is open wider, and you were never told there to want less. That is not my kindness; it is His written word, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a line from Psalm 81 and sets it in front of a man at a counter on a Saturday night as though it had his name on it.

What nothing else reaches

Here is the second psalm, and it is the one this whole site stands on, so let me put it down plainly and not improve it.

For he satisfies the longing soul, and the hungry soul he fills with good things.Psalm 107:9

The longing soul. Notice that the psalm does not say the contented soul or the disciplined soul. It says the longing one. God's satisfaction is aimed at longing the way a meal is aimed at hunger, and the longing is not the obstacle. It is the address.

Now think about Wednesday and Saturday with that in your hand. The thing came, and it reached as far as it could reach, and it was good, and it did not reach the bottom. The reaching went further down than the thing did. Do you see what that means? It does not mean the thing was bad, and it does not mean you are broken. It means your hunger is deeper than that thing, and there is exactly one table sized to it. He satisfies what nothing else reaches, and the reason nothing else reaches it is that nothing else was ever supposed to. The card by the kettle was never going to feed the whole of you. It was not made to. He was.

You have a hunger that is sized for God, and it is being fed at His table tonight, at the depth nothing on Wednesday could get to. I am not speaking my own comfort over you; it is what is written in Psalm 107, and His Spirit is the one carrying a psalm about the longing soul into a man who thought his longing was the problem.

Jesus told a story about this once, and I cannot stop hearing it. A son far from home, so hungry he would have eaten what the pigs ate, and nobody gave him anything. And he came home. And read what the father did with the boy's hunger: he did not lecture it. He did not say you should have wanted less. He said bring the fattened calf, and let us eat and celebrate, and the first thing the returning son received was a table. That is the Father in the story and the Father is the point of the story. Come home hungry. He sets a table.

You are being received tonight the way that son was received, at a table and not at a lecture. It is written in Luke 15, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes a story about somebody else's homecoming into a chair pulled out for you.

The smallest thing that could be asked

Now the small thing, and I want you to see how small, because a hungry man does not need another task.

Jesus said that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, moves it, and it is spoken, not felt at, not achieved. Said. And the mountain here is not your appetite. Hear me: I am not asking you to say anything to your appetite except come to the table. The mountain is a sentence, and you know it, because it has been standing at the counter with you: I should not still be hungry. Speak to that. And what is asked of you weighs less than one sentence of thanks over a pan, which is the whole of the physical act below. You are in Christ, and He is the Bread that came down, so the standing to receive at His table was handed to you in Him and does not have to be earned by wanting less first. Scripture says the longing soul is the one He satisfies, and His Spirit is the one who makes an ordinary mouthful into a meal received from His hand.