He Still Cooks For Fourteen

He buys for fourteen. He has bought for fourteen his whole adult life.

There are nine now. There have been nine for three years.

Every Sunday he makes the amount his mother made, in the pots she used, with the same going round in the same order, and every Sunday a good part of it goes into the bin on Monday.

He knows exactly what he is doing while he is doing it. That is the part he would want said. This is not absent mindedness and it is not habit. He stands in a shop with a trolley and does the arithmetic and then buys for fourteen.

Here is why, and he has never said it out loud to anybody.

Buying the smaller amount would be agreeing to something.

It would be the first physical act of accepting that this is what the family is now. Everything else can stay provisional. The chairs are still in the loft. The extra leaf is still in the table. But food is bought fresh every week, and buying nine people's worth of anything would be a decision made with money, on a Saturday, in a shop, and once you have made it once you have made it.

His daughter offered to do the shopping to help him out.

She came back with the right amount for nine.

He thanked her properly and he meant it, and he was not able to look at the bags, and he has never told her why, and she has never asked, and he thinks she may know.

If you are still cooking for a number that is not the number, come in and take a plate. There is far too much and there always is.

The psalm of people who could not sing

There is a psalm written by people who had been carried away from everything, and the extraordinary thing about it is that nobody edited it into something more hopeful.

By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat down, yea, we wept, when we remembered Zion. We hanged our harps upon the willows in the midst thereof. For there they that carried us away captive required of us a song ... How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land?Psalm 137:1-4

They sat down and wept. That is the first thing that happens and nobody stops it.

They hung the harps up. They did not play. When they were asked for a song they did not produce one, and the psalm does not treat that as a failure of faith, it simply records it.

And then the question, which is left as a question. How shall we sing the Lord's song in a strange land. Nobody answers it. It sits at the end of the verse, unresolved, in the songbook, for three thousand years.

You are inside a psalm that lets a people sit down and weep over what a thing used to be. Psalm 137:1 records the sitting and the weeping and the remembering together, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept a song of unresolved grief in the collection rather than replacing it with a recovery, which means what happens in your kitchen on a Sunday is not a failure to move on.

What the fourteen is actually doing

Now the number, because it is doing something and it deserves to be seen properly rather than corrected.

Buying for fourteen is a refusal to file a change as permanent.

That is not denial. Denial would be pretending nine people is fourteen. You know it is nine. You do the arithmetic in the shop and then you decide, deliberately, to buy as though it were not settled.

That is closer to hope than to confusion, and it has been costing you money and food and something in your chest every Monday for three years.

You have been holding a door open with a shopping list, and no verse anywhere charges a man for that. Romans 12:12 says rejoicing in hope, patient in tribulation, and it puts the hope and the tribulation in the same short line rather than making a person finish one before the other starts, and it is the same Spirit who is called the earnest of the inheritance, which means the fourteen has been hope with a receipt attached and not a man refusing to face facts.

What the bin costs

Here is the part nobody sees, and it should be named.

Every Monday, alone, you scrape food into a bin.

Nobody helps with that. Nobody knows it is a weekly event. It is the moment the whole thing is admitted, in private, with a spoon, and then the week starts.

You were doing the grieving on your own every Monday, and it has been seen every single time. Psalm 56:8 says thou tellest my wanderings, put thou my tears into thy bottle, are they not in thy book, and it is the Holy Spirit who kept a verse that physical rather than a more dignified one, which means three years of Mondays are counted somewhere and none of them went unwitnessed.