There Is Only Me Now

You ate toast standing at the counter again and that is four nights.

You did not decide to. There was a moment at about six when you thought about cooking something, and you opened the cupboard, and the effort of it appeared in front of you as a whole sequence, the pan and the chopping and the washing up afterward, and you had toast instead.

And you ate it standing up, which is the part I want to come back to.

Nobody sees this. That is the first thing worth saying. Whatever you tell people about how you are managing, and you tell them you are managing, the actual arrangement is that you have stopped feeding yourself properly and nobody in the world knows.

I am not going to tell you that you need to look after yourself.

You have had that said to you a great deal, by people who love you, in a tone of concern, and it has done nothing at all. Because it is advice given to somebody who has stopped valuing the thing being recommended, and advice cannot reach that.

So let me name what has actually happened, and see if it is nearer the truth.

You did not stop cooking because it is a lot of effort for one person.

You stopped because cooking was something you did for somebody, and the person it was for is not here, and so the activity has lost its object. And a thing without an object stops happening, not through decision but through drift.

That is why it is not laziness and why being told to look after yourself does not touch it. Nobody is failing at self care in that kitchen. What has happened is that an act which was always aimed at another person no longer has anywhere to land.

A cake baken on the coals

There is a passage in First Kings about a man at the end of himself, and what he is given is not what anybody expects.

And he looked, and, behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head. And he did eat and drink, and laid him down again. (1 Kings 19:6, King James Version)

Behold, there was a cake baken on the coals, and a cruse of water at his head.

Set the scene, because it is one of the lowest points in scripture.

Elijah has asked to die. He is under a tree in the wilderness, alone, having run away, and he has told God he has had enough and wants it to end.

And what arrives is not a rebuke, and not an argument, and not a plan.

Food arrives. Bread and water, prepared, and put beside him while he slept, and he is woken and told to eat.

And then the detail that should land on you: he ate, and laid him down again. He went back to sleep. Nothing was resolved. He was not required to feel better or to get up and do anything, and the angel comes back later and feeds him a second time.

So the first thing done for a man who wanted to die was that somebody made him a meal.

Not counsel. Not scripture. Not company, even, in any conversational sense. A cake baked on hot stones and some water, put where he would find it.

That is God treating a person who does not want to eat as somebody who should be fed anyway, and doing it twice, without asking him to justify being alive first.

You are somebody who should be fed anyway, and it has never once been required that you feel like it first. First Kings 19:6 puts bread beside a man who had asked to die and lets him sleep again after, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody who is not eating properly and has told nobody.

Sitting down is the whole of it

Here is the practical part, and it is not about the food.

Cook whatever you like. The article does not care. Something that takes eleven minutes is entirely acceptable and a proper thing is also fine.

The instruction is that you sit down at the table with it.

And here is why that half is the load bearing one.

Eating standing at a counter is not a meal. It is refuelling, done quickly, in a posture that says this does not warrant stopping. And you have been doing it for months, and every time you do it you tell yourself something without words: that you are not an occasion. That one person does not justify a table.

Sitting down contradicts that, physically, without requiring you to believe anything.

That is why it is the assignment rather than the cooking. You cannot argue yourself into feeling that you are worth the trouble; that is not how any of this works. But you can sit down, which is an action, and the action makes a claim that your feelings do not have to agree with yet.

And there is a specific practical thing about the table, which is that the table is probably where the difficulty is.

For a lot of people in your position it is not the cooking that is avoided. It is that particular piece of furniture, with the other chair at it, and the counter is where you have been hiding from it.

If that is true, then sitting there is a much larger thing than it looks, and doing it once is not a small evening.

You are able to sit down whether or not you feel worth the trouble, and the posture has never once needed your agreement first. The written word puts food beside a man who wanted to die and asks him to justify nothing, and the Spirit of God is the one present at a table with one person at it.

Cook one thing and sit at the table

So here is the assignment.

Cook one thing tonight and eat it at the table rather than standing up.

One thing, and small is fine. This is not about nutrition and I am not going to tell you what to make. If eleven minutes and one pan is what is available tonight, that is the thing.

And then sit at the table.

Put it on a plate, sit in a chair, and eat it sitting down, without the radio doing the job of company if you would rather it did not, though the radio is allowed and so is anything else that gets you into the chair.

And if the other chair is the problem, you may move it. You may put it against the wall, or take it out of the room, or sit in it yourself, or leave it exactly where it is because moving it feels like something you are not ready to do.

All of those are acceptable and none of them is the exercise. The exercise is that you are in a chair at a table with food you made.

It will probably not feel good. I want to say that so that you do not measure it by that and conclude it failed. It may be one of the harder half hours of the week and it will still have been worth doing, because you will have fed yourself as though you counted, once, on a Tuesday, whatever you were feeling while you did it.

You are able to eat sitting down on a hard evening, and it has never once needed to feel good in order to have counted. First Kings 19:6 feeds a man who wanted to die and lets him lie down again afterward, and the Holy Spirit is the one present in a chair at a table.