This Week There Is Less

You counted the cupboard on Sunday night with the door open and your hand on the shelf.

Not a list. You did not write anything down. You stood there and went along it, item by item, touching some of them, working out what was actually there rather than what you thought was there.

And then you closed it and went and sat down and did not say anything to anybody.

This week there is less.

I want to be exact about what this article is and is not, because the wrong sentence here would be worse than silence.

There is no promise in it. Nothing here says the money will come, or that God will not let your children go without, or that provision arrives when you need it most. Not stated and not implied and not at the end.

If somebody handed you that and it did not happen, you would not conclude that they had been careless with you. It would leave you with a lie that is never true, that you had failed to believe properly, on top of a thin week, and that is a considerably heavier thing to carry than an empty cupboard.

And there is no method in it either. No budgeting system, no advice about shopping, and no clever way to make what you have go further, because you have been doing this for a while and are almost certainly better at it than anybody who would write such a thing.

What this article is about is the sentence that arrived while your hand was on the shelf.

Because something did arrive, and it was not about arithmetic. It was closer to: they deserve better than this.

That is what I want to answer.

Better is a dinner of herbs

There is a line in Proverbs that compares two meals directly, and the comparison is more useful than any encouragement.

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is, than a stalled ox and hatred therewith. (Proverbs 15:17, King James Version)

Better is a dinner of herbs where love is.

A dinner of herbs is the cheapest thing on the table in that world. It is what you eat when there is nothing else, greens and not much of them, and everybody hearing that proverb would have understood it immediately as the bottom of the range.

And a stalled ox is the top. That is a beast fattened deliberately, kept in a stall for the purpose, and it is the most expensive meal a household could produce.

So this is not a comparison between a modest meal and a slightly better one. It is the extreme against the extreme, chosen on purpose, and the verdict is stated flatly: better is the herbs.

And notice what the deciding factor is. Where love is. Not where gratitude is, not where contentment is, not where faith is. Love, which is what is happening between the people at that table rather than anything they have achieved or believed.

Now hold that against your Sunday night.

You were standing at a cupboard concluding that what you can put down this week is not enough for them. And the verse is doing the comparison you were doing, at the widest possible spread, and reaching the opposite verdict, on the grounds of the one thing your table has plenty of.

That is not a consolation for people with no money. It is a ranking, and it is the wrong way round from the one you have been using.

What you put down this week is ranked above the expensive version, and the deciding factor has never once been what was on the plate. Proverbs 15:17 sets the cheapest meal against the most expensive and calls the cheap one better, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing at an open cupboard.

They are not counting

Here is the practical part, and it is about what your household actually perceives.

They do not know what week this is.

You know. You have known since Thursday, and you have been carrying it alone, and you have made about nine small adjustments already that nobody has noticed.

But children, and most adults, do not experience a week as expensive or cheap. They experience it as what was for dinner. They notice atmosphere far more than they notice ingredients, and what registers in a house is not the cost of a meal but whether the person who made it was tense while making it.

Which means the thing most likely to make this week hard for them is not the food.

It is that you have been quietly braced since Sunday, and that you will be slightly short with somebody on Wednesday for a reason they cannot see, and that you will apologize for the meal as you put it down.

That apology is the one thing in the whole situation that tells them anything is wrong. Without it, Thursday is just Thursday and the food is just the food.

I am not saying pretend. I am saying that the information they are actually receiving comes through you rather than through the plate, and that this is worth knowing, because it is the part of a thin week that is genuinely in your hands.

What reaches them comes through you rather than through the plate, and the apology has never once been information they had before you gave it. The written word puts the whole difference in what is happening between the people, and the Spirit of God is the one present at a table where nobody is bracing.

Two meals from what is here

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately small and it costs nothing.

Plan two meals from what is already in the cupboard.

Two. Not the week. From what is in the house right now, with nothing bought and no shop involved.

Stand at the same cupboard, and this time do not audit it. Look at it as materials rather than as a shortfall, and work out two things that could be made from what is on those shelves.

Write them down if it helps. Two meals, existing, available, requiring nothing further.

And here is why this is the assignment rather than anything about money.

On Sunday you counted what was missing. That is what an audit is: an assessment of a store against a requirement, and it always returns a deficit, because that is the arithmetic it performs.

Two meals is the opposite operation. It asks what is present and what it could become, and it returns an actual answer, and the answer is two dinners you did not know you had.

You will probably find them in about four minutes. That is not because the cupboard is fuller than you thought. It is because you have never once looked at it that way round.

And that is the whole of it. Two meals. Nothing about the rest of the week, which I am not going to pretend to solve, and nothing about the money, which I am not going to promise anything about.

You are able to look at what is present rather than audit what is missing, and an audit has never once returned anything but a deficit. Proverbs 15:17 puts the poor table above the rich one on the grounds of what is between the people, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing at a shelf counting differently.