What You Have Been Eating Instead of Rest

Twenty to midnight and the dishwasher is on its last cycle, making that low grinding noise it has made since March that somebody is going to look at one of these days.

The house is finally down. The last light went off up there twenty minutes ago. The lunches are made and stacked in the fridge door. The uniform is on the radiator. The form got signed and put back in the bag by the shoes so nobody has to go hunting for it at ten past eight.

She is barefoot on the kitchen tile and the tile is cold, and she has been standing at the open fridge for a while now with her hand on the top of the door, looking in.

She is not hungry. She had dinner. She knows she is not hungry, and that knowing is sitting right there beside her the whole time, entirely useless.

She shuts the fridge. Then she goes to the cupboard over the stove, the one nobody bothers with, and reaches behind the rice for what she keeps behind the rice. She opens it standing up, and she does the thing she has done a thousand times, which is press the wrapper against her sleeve as she opens it, so it does not crinkle loud enough to be heard on the stairs.

She eats it in the dark, standing at the counter, in about four minutes.

And it is good. That is what nobody says out loud about this. It is genuinely good. For about four minutes the day stops. Nobody needs a single thing from her. Nobody is calling down. There is a small warm quiet in the middle of her that has not been there since six o'clock in the morning, and it is the only quiet she has been given all day, and she went and got it herself off a shelf behind the rice.

Then it is over. And then comes the other part, the part with no name, standing in her own kitchen at ten to twelve with an empty wrapper in her hand, feeling something she would not call shame in front of anybody but would not call anything else either.

She puts the wrapper at the bottom of the bin and puts other rubbish on top of it.

And I am going to stop calling her she.

Because you know that cupboard. You know your own version, the shelf or the drawer or the bottom of the freezer, and you know the exact hour, and you know it is the only part of the whole day that belonged to you. You have promised yourself you would not, and you meant it when you promised, and by twenty to midnight the person who made that promise was somebody else, somebody rested, somebody who had not just done fourteen hours.

You are not standing in your kitchen at midnight because you are weak. Come and sit down. I want to tell you what you were actually reaching for.

You were not being greedy. You were being tired.

Let me start with the part you have never been given. The Spirit was in that kitchen at twenty to midnight, standing at the open fridge door beside you, and He was not there to catch you at anything. What is written about hungry souls says the opposite, and we are going to get to it.

That hunger at twenty to midnight is real. It is not imaginary, it is not you being dramatic, and it is not a character defect that runs in your family. It is a real, sharp, physical wanting, and the reason it will not answer to good sense is that it was never about the food in the first place.

Look at what actually happened in that kitchen. From six in the morning until nearly midnight, not one minute of that day was yours. Every hour of it had somebody else's name on it. And nowhere in the whole eighteen hours did anybody hand you an off switch, or a stopping place, or ten minutes where the demand went quiet.

So at twenty to midnight your body went looking for the closest thing to rest that a person can get standing up, in the dark, in four minutes, without asking anybody for anything and without waking a soul.

And it found it. Behind the rice.

That is not greed. That is a tired woman being resourceful with what was actually available to her. There was nothing else on the shelf. Rest was not on the shelf. Rest had never once been on the shelf.

Now hear where God puts this, because He is not squeamish about hunger and He never has been.

For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness.Psalm 107:9

That verse comes out of a story about people who had walked too far. They were wandering in a wilderness with no city to go to, and the psalm says plainly that their soul fainted in them. That is the phrase. Fainted. Not sinned. Not failed. Gave out, the way a body gives out when it has been going too long without a place to stop.

And what God does about a fainting soul is not correct it. He fills it.

Read the words He chose. Satisfies. Fills. Goodness. There is not one syllable of policing in that verse. He is not standing at the cupboard door with His arms folded, keeping track. He is the One coming toward a worn out person with something good in His hands, and He is coming toward the longing, not around it.

So I want to take one thing off you tonight and I want to be very plain about it.

The problem was never that you reached. Reaching is what a hungry soul does, and God says so Himself, out loud, in a psalm, without a hint of disapproval. The trouble is only ever that the shelf was short. You reached for rest and rest was not stocked, so you took the nearest thing, and then you have spent months believing that the reaching was the sin. You are not being corrected tonight. You are being read correctly, by the word that named a fainting soul long before it named yours, and by the Spirit who stood at that cupboard with you and never once looked away.

It was not. It was a signal, and it was an accurate one. It has been telling you the truth about your day this whole time and you have been treating it as an enemy.

Freedom here does not look like a stronger will at midnight. It looks like getting the thing you were actually after. It looks like a soul being satisfied by God at the exact point where it was fainting, and the wrapper losing its job, not because you fought it, but because it was standing in for something you now have. Psalm 107:9 is not a report about somebody else's wilderness. His Spirit is what carries it across three thousand years and sets it down in a kitchen with a grinding dishwasher and cold tile under bare feet.