I Only Eat When Something Is Wrong

He noticed it because this year has been fine, and fine has been unexpectedly difficult.

Nothing has happened to Beto in about fourteen months. No diagnosis, no redundancy, no crisis with the children. The van passed its test. His mother is well. It is, by any measure anybody would use, a good year.

And it has been the flattest fourteen months of his adult life.

He worked out why in the spring, sitting in the van outside a job with his lunch, and the answer arrived in one piece and did not require thinking about.

He only comes to God properly when something is wrong.

Not superficially. He is not a man who only prays in emergencies and he would push back hard if you said that. He goes, he prays, he has a habit in the mornings that he has kept since he was twenty-six.

But there is a difference between that and the other thing, and he knows the difference exactly, because he can name the last four times the other thing happened and every one of them has a disaster attached to it.

The night in the hospital corridor with his daughter. The three months after the business went. The week his mother was in and out and nobody would say anything definite. And a Sunday in his twenties he does not discuss.

Four occasions in twenty years, and all four of them were fires.

So over twenty years something has fused in him without his permission, which is that being fed and being in trouble have become one thing, and a good year does not read as a blessing, it reads as distance.

He is forty-four and he said the whole thing out loud in the van, and then he said, more quietly, I do not know how to come to You on a Tuesday when nothing is wrong.

And you may know that van. You may be having a good year, and it may be sitting on you strangely, and you may never have connected the two things.

The hand opens on ordinary days for everything alive

Take this off before we go a step further, because you have carried it for twenty years and it was never yours.

You are not further away in a good year. You never were. Scripture describes a hand that opens for every living thing on ordinary days with no crisis anywhere in the sentence, and it is the Holy Spirit, not the size of the trouble, who does the feeding. Set it down here in the van. It is heavy and it has been on the seat beside you since the spring.

Now hear the lines, and hear what they are describing.

The eyes of all look to you, and you give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.Psalm 145:15

Every living thing.

That is not a rescue verse. There is no emergency in it. It is a description of ordinary provision going out to everything that eats, on a normal day, in a world where most creatures are not in a crisis at any given moment.

The eyes of all look to Him. Not the eyes of the ones in trouble. All.

Which means the arrangement you have been living under, where feeding arrives with fire attached, is not the arrangement Scripture describes. That one runs on ordinary days, at proper times, with an open hand.

And you are inside it. Right now, at forty-four, in a good year, in a van outside a job. That stands written, and His Spirit is the one who opens that hand, and He has never once required a disaster to justify it.

Now let me be careful here, because this page could do harm and I have no intention of doing any.

Nothing on this page is a comment on how your church does anything or how often. That belongs to your church, it stays exactly where it is, and I am not putting a view about it into your head.

And nothing here says the four fires were false or that what happened in that corridor was manufactured. It was not. God was in that corridor and in those three months and He met you and you were not imagining it, and Scripture is full of Him doing exactly that in exactly those places.

The point is only that a man can conclude from four true rescues that rescue is the only channel, and Scripture describes a much wider one. His Spirit is the one who has been opening that hand through all fourteen flat months.

Here is the tender part, and Scripture is gentle with it. The flatness is not distance.

It is a man who learned to be fed in fires, standing in a year with no fire in it, correctly reporting that the familiar route is closed and wrongly concluding that the kitchen is shut. His Spirit is not further away, and He was in the van.