I Eat Standing At The Counter

You cook in that kitchen every day, and you have never once sat down in it.

Think about that for a second, because it is genuinely odd and nobody ever says it out loud. You spend more waking hours in that room than in any other room in the house. You know where every single thing lives. Your hands know the drawer that sticks.

And when the food is ready, you plate it up for everybody else, and then you stand over the sink and eat yours out of the pan, or off the counter, in about four minutes, while the tap runs.

There is a reason for it, and the reason is good. Somebody has to keep moving. If you sit down, the next thing does not happen, and the next thing is always waiting.

But I want to name what has quietly happened, because it happened slowly enough that it never got noticed.

You have made yourself the staff of your own house.

Not the mother. Not the woman who lives here. The staff. The person who prepares the thing and then eats standing up out of the way of the people who are eating it properly.

And I am not going to fix your evenings, because I do not know what is in them. What we are going to do is ten minutes, in a chair, in that room, tonight.

They did eat their meat with gladness

There is a description of the very first church that is mostly about food, and almost nobody preaches it that way.

And they, continuing daily with one accord in the temple, and breaking bread from house to house, did eat their meat with gladness and singleness of heart. (Acts 2:46, King James Version)

Look at where the eating happens. From house to house. Not in a hall, not at a banquet. In ordinary kitchens belonging to ordinary people, day after day.

And look at the two words attached to the eating. Gladness. Singleness of heart.

Singleness of heart means undivided. Not doing three things at once. Not half here and half at the next task. The very first thing recorded about how these people ate is that their attention was in one piece while they did it.

You are somebody the Scripture describes eating with an undivided heart, and four minutes over a sink has never once been the portion set aside for the woman who cooked. Acts 2:46 records daily meals in ordinary houses eaten with gladness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who says so in a kitchen at the end of a long day.

Now I want you to notice what the verse does not say.

It does not say the houses were nice. It does not describe a single kitchen. There is nothing about the table, the plates, the room or the standard of anything.

The whole weight of the sentence is on how the people ate, not on where. Daily, together, glad, undivided.

You have everything the passage asks for already standing in your kitchen, and the state of a room has never once been a condition on eating with gladness in it. The Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary evening meal a glad one, and Acts 2:46 says nothing whatever about the houses it happened in.

The woman who does not get a chair

Let me say the hard thing gently, because I think it needs saying.

Everybody else in your house sits down.

They sit because the food arrives in front of them and there is a chair there. Nobody in that house decided that you should stand. There was never a meeting. It happened because the one moving was you, and a person who is moving does not sit, and after a few years the standing became how the meals work.

Which means nobody is going to hand you the chair. There is nobody to hand it to you, because nobody in the room knows it is missing.

You are the only person who can put yourself in a chair, and years of being the one who keeps moving has never once removed your place at the table. It is written in Acts 2:46 that they broke bread from house to house and ate with gladness, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells a woman that the description includes the one who cooked it.

And here is the practical thing, and it is small and it is real.

Ten minutes sitting down does not undo an evening. That is the fear, and it is worth answering directly. The next thing will still be there in ten minutes. The kitchen does not become unmanageable because a woman sat down in it for the length of one short conversation.

What actually happens is that the meal stops being a task performed between two other tasks, and starts being a thing that occurred.

You have ten minutes that the evening will survive, and one short sit down has never once been the thing that made a household fall behind. The Spirit of God is the one who holds a woman in a chair while she is convinced she should be moving, and Acts 2:46 puts the whole worth of the meal in how it was eaten rather than how fast.

There is one more thing.

The state of that kitchen is not a report on you. It has never been. The counter is full because a family is being fed out of it, and that is what a full counter means, and I am not going to let it be read as anything else while you are sitting down in there.

You are being fed in a room that is doing its job, and a crowded counter has never once been evidence about the woman standing at it. Acts 2:46 describes daily bread broken in ordinary houses without one word of comment about them, and the same Spirit who filled those rooms is at work in yours.

Ten minutes and a chair

So here is the assignment.

Sit down in your kitchen for ten minutes tonight while you eat, and move one thing off the counter before you get up.

Sit in a chair, at the table if there is one, at the end of the counter if there is not. Plate in front of you. Not the pan.

Ten minutes on a clock, so that it is not a guess, and so that when the pull to stand arrives at minute three you have something to argue with.

You are eating a meal rather than absorbing one, and a plate on a table has never once been an extravagance in the house of the woman who cooked it. The Holy Spirit is the one who steadies a woman in a chair for the first time in a long while, and it is written in Acts 2:46 that they ate with gladness and singleness of heart.

The pull will come. It will feel like waste. It will feel like there is something you have forgotten. That is the four years of standing talking, and it will pass.

Then, before you get up, move one thing off the counter. One. Whatever is nearest and does not belong there.

Not the counter. One thing.

You are leaving that room slightly different from how you found it and rested at the same time, and the two of those together have never once been more than one woman could do in ten minutes. The Spirit of God is the one at work in a small ordinary act, and Acts 2:46 holds the whole of it in daily bread in an ordinary house.