The Meal You Could Not Taste

His sister has cooked for two days.

Lamb, done the long slow way. Rice with the crust on the bottom that everybody fights over. Warm bread on a cloth, and the good glasses, and a bowl of figs because she remembered he likes them.

He arrives on time. He carries in the chairs from the hall. He kisses the top of his mother's head and asks his nephew about the football, and he is not pretending any of it, because he loves these people and he is glad to be in this kitchen.

And under the table, on his knee, out of sight, his right hand is doing sums.

Thursday, the standing order. The van, which is making the noise again, and the man said what the noise means. The gap between now and the end of the month, which is not a shape he can change by looking at it, and which he looks at anyway, seven or eight times an hour, the way a tongue goes back to a broken tooth.

Nobody at that table knows. He is talkative tonight. He asks good questions. He passes things before they are asked for.

He simply cannot taste any of it.

The lamb goes in and it might as well be paper. The bread goes in and it is warm and it means nothing. He is chewing and nodding and running the same three numbers in a loop, and the loop does not solve, because it never solves, because it is not the sort of thing that solves at a dinner table on a Friday.

Afterwards his sister leans on the door frame while he puts his coat on and asks how it was, in the way a woman asks when she has been cooking since Wednesday.

Wonderful, he says. And it was. He would not know.

He got in the van and could not have told you one thing about the taste of any of it.

You have sat at that table.

Maybe yours was a birthday. A wedding. A Tuesday with beans on toast and the children talking over each other. Wherever it was, you know the trick of being fully present in the room and completely absent from the plate, because underneath the tablecloth the arithmetic is running, and it does not stop for lamb.

And here is what nobody says to you about it, so let me. The sums are not a character flaw. They are a real man doing real work with real numbers that matter.

They have simply taken up residence somewhere they were never meant to live.

The counting is honest work

Start by clearing something out of the way, because a lot of religious writing about money quietly insults the reader and calls it faith.

The counting is not the sin. The counting is competence.

You are not a lesser believer for knowing exactly where you stand. Jesus asked which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first and counteth the cost, Luke 14:28, and He said it approvingly, as a picture of sense, and the Holy Spirit has never once asked anybody to stop knowing what is in the account.

So nothing here is going to tell you to stop doing the sums. A man with a van that is making a noise needs to know what the noise means.

What has happened is smaller and more fixable than that. The arithmetic has stopped keeping office hours. It used to sit at a desk on a Sunday evening with a cup of tea and a piece of paper. Now it comes to weddings. It sits under the table at your sister's house with its hand on your knee, and it eats your food before you can taste it.

You have a Father who already knows the number, to the penny, tonight. Matthew 6:8 says your Father knoweth what things ye have need of before ye ask him, so the running of the loop is not what keeps Him informed, and the Holy Spirit did not need the seventh recalculation of the evening to bring Him up to date.

What actually got taken

Look at what has gone missing, because it is not the money.

The money is where it is. The month is the shape the month is. Nothing in this message moves a figure, and anyone who tells you a page of writing can is selling you something.

What has gone missing is taste.

O taste and see that the Lord is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.Psalm 34:8

Taste, in that sentence, is the verb of a person who is actually present. You cannot taste something at a distance. You cannot taste something you are thinking past. The psalm does not say analyze and see, or calculate and see. It says taste, which is the most immediate, most physical, least abstract word available to a man in a room with bread in it.

You are invited to taste, and the invitation stands on a hard month exactly as it stands on an easy one. Psalm 34:8 says taste and see that the Lord is good, and the psalm's own heading places it in a season of running and hiding rather than a season of plenty, and the Holy Spirit issues that invitation to the man with the van as readily as to anybody else.

Now the thing that has to be said plainly, because this category is where the lie usually lives.

You were never given money as a report card on your faith. Ecclesiastes 9:11 says the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, and Scripture puts that there precisely so nobody reads a bank balance as a spiritual grade, and the Holy Spirit is not running an assessment on your household through your account.

A tight month is not a verdict. A comfortable month is not a commendation. Neither one is the measure of anything, and a man who believes otherwise will be either crushed or smug, and both of those are poor ways to sit at a table.

You are carried and you are not being audited. 1 Peter 5:7 says casting all your care upon him, for he careth for you, and the reason given is His care rather than your qualification, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the actual lifting when a man finally puts a number down.