Cutting the Tablets in Two

Thursday night, near enough ten. The lamp over the kitchen table is on and nothing else in the house is, and the table has been cleared except for three things, which he has laid out in a line the way a man lays out tools.

The bottle. His phone, face up, with the bank open on it. And the little blue cutter from the pharmacy with the hinged lid and the blade in it, the one they gave him years ago for something else entirely.

He has counted the bottle twice. Twelve.

He does the other sum on his fingers under the edge of the table, which is ridiculous, because he has done it four times already tonight and it comes out the same every time. Nineteen days until the money goes in. Twelve in the bottle. He is seven short and there is nothing between here and the nineteenth that turns twelve into nineteen.

He picks up the cutter and turns it over in his hand. Sets it down. Picks it up again.

He is not a foolish man. He worked forty one years. He has never once been late with anything in his life and he has a folder in the drawer with every receipt in it going back further than anybody would need. He is the person other people in this family ring when they cannot make a number work.

And he is sitting at his own table at ten at night, alone on purpose, because his wife has gone up and he waited until she did, doing arithmetic on a bottle of tablets with a blade in his hand.

He has not told the doctor. He has not told the woman at the counter, who has known him fifteen years and always asks after the grandkids. He has not told his son, who would drive over tonight and would be hurt for a month that he had to find out this way.

The fridge kicks on. He puts the cutter down flat on the cloth and puts both hands over his face for a second, and that is the whole of it, and then he takes his hands down and looks at the bottle again.

And I am going to stop calling him he.

Because you have the number. You know how many are left and you know what day the money comes and you know the gap between those two things down to the day, and you have known it since about the middle of last month.

And you have not told a soul. Not because you are proud, whatever you might say if somebody pushed you on it. It is simpler and worse than pride. It is that saying it out loud in a room with a person in it would make it a fact about your life, and right now it is only a fact about a bottle.

Sit down here with me a minute. I am not going to tell you what to do with your dose. I am going to tell you what is actually happening at that table.

The arithmetic at that table

Let me say the true thing first, plainly, the way you would want it said.

That is a hard place to be sitting, and I am not going to dress it up. There is nothing noble in it and nothing shameful in it. It is a shortfall, and it has a number, and the number does not care how hard you worked or how carefully you have lived. Psalm 23 never once opens by pretending the field is full. Nor is the Spirit sitting across that table from you tonight with an opinion about your forty one years.

And I want to be very careful with you here, because you are holding something I have no business touching.

I am not going to tell you it is fine to make that bottle last. I am not going to tell you to change what you take, in either direction. That is not mine, and it is not safe for anybody to guess at from a distance, and you should not be deciding it by yourself at a kitchen table at ten at night with a blade in your hand.

Here is the plain move, and it is smaller than you think.

Tell the pharmacist. Say the actual words: I cannot afford this one, and I have been trying to make it stretch. Say it to whoever wrote the prescription too. That sentence is not begging and it is not a confession. It is clinical information, and it is information they genuinely need in order to look after you properly, and a prescriber who does not know you cannot afford it is treating a patient they do not actually have.

They can very often do something. A different quantity, a different form of the same medicine, an older equivalent that costs a fraction, a manufacturer's help scheme, a call to the office to change what was written. None of that is guaranteed and I will not promise you any of it. But the woman behind that counter who asks after your grandkids has spent her working life solving exactly this, quietly, for people who never told anybody either, and she cannot solve it for a man who never says it.

Now let me tell you what is really under the arithmetic, because it is not the seven tablets.

The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.Psalm 23:1

David wrote that as a man who had done the job. He had been the one out on the hill overnight, and he was not being poetic about somebody else's work. He knew exactly what a shepherd is for.

And notice what that sentence actually settles. It is not a promise that the field is always green or that nothing ever runs short. Read the rest of the psalm and there is a valley in it and there is a table set in front of enemies, which means the enemies are still in the room. That psalm never once pretends the trouble left.

What it settles is whose job the need is.

I shall not want. That is not a boast about supply. It is a statement about responsibility, and the responsibility has moved off the sheep. A sheep is not required to solve the shortfall. It is not required to lie awake working out the gap between the twelfth and the nineteenth. Its needs are its shepherd's business, and it is not being negligent when it stops carrying them.

You have been shepherding yourself. Since the middle of last month, alone, at ten at night, with the lamp on and the house asleep and nobody allowed to know. That is the actual weight you are under, and it is heavier than the seven tablets, and it was never yours. Psalm 23:1 moved it off you long before you were born, and the Spirit did not bring you to this page in order to hand it back.

And hear this too. God is not embarrassed by a small need. There is nothing beneath Him about a bottle on a table. He is not waiting for you to bring Him something more dignified. The shepherd in that psalm makes the sheep lie down before He does anything else, which tells you that He deals with exhaustion first, and He is not in a hurry, and He is not disappointed in you.