Four Hundred Bowls Of Soup

The pot is the green enamel one with the chip on the lip, and Ilona has had it since before she was married, and it goes on at about ten past eleven every morning of her life.

The kitchen is stone and it holds the cold until nearly noon, and the light comes in low across the sink at this hour and catches all the dust she has stopped seeing. There is a smudge on the door frame at hand height where her father steadies himself coming through, and she has wiped it a hundred times and it always comes back, and she has come to think of it as a kind of signature.

Four years now. He is in the back room. He is slower than he was and he needs the soup soft, and there is nothing dramatic about any of it, which is the part nobody tells you. It is not a crisis. It is Tuesday, and then it is Tuesday again.

And then last Tuesday, standing right there with the wooden spoon in her hand and the steam coming up, Ilona counted.

She did not mean to. It began as arithmetic about the carrots and it went sideways. Four years. Call it six days out of seven. She did the multiplication twice because she got a different answer the first time, and the number that came out the other end was four hundred and something, and she stood there and looked at it the way you look at a stranger who has walked into your kitchen.

Four hundred bowls of soup.

She turned the heat down. She put the spoon on the rest. And what went through her was not tiredness, because she has been tired for four years and tiredness is old news. What went through her was fright.

Because a woman who loves her father does not count. That was the thought, arriving fully formed, the way the worst ones do. A woman who is actually good does not keep a tally in the back of her head like a shopkeeper. And if the number was there to be found, then it had been getting written down all along, every morning, quietly, without her permission, which means the whole four years has been something other than what she believed it was.

She carried the bowl down the hall anyway. She always does. She put it on the little table and moved the lamp so he could see it, and she said something about the weather, and she came back and stood at the sink and did not cry, because she does not, and washed the pot.

But the number has not gone anywhere. It is in the kitchen with her now, every morning at ten past eleven.

You know that number. Maybe yours is nights, or trips, or the count of how many times you have explained the same thing patiently to somebody who lives in your house. And you found it one ordinary day and you did not put it down again, and what frightened you was not the size of it. It was that you had been keeping it.

You Counted Because You Are Not Infinite

Let me take the frightening thing first and take it apart, because it is not what you think it is.

You counted because you are finite. That is all. Counting is what a limited creature does when it has been drawing on its own reserves for a long time and some quiet part of it wants to know how much is left. It is not the accounting of a shopkeeper. It is the fuel gauge of a body, and a gauge reading low is not a moral failure. It is information.

You have not sinned by counting, and the number is not evidence against you. The Spirit knew the state of your reserves long before you did the multiplication, and Romans 8:26 says it plainly, that the Spirit helps us in our weakness, which is a sentence written for somebody standing at a stove.

And here is the second half, which is the one that actually changes the mornings. You were made finite on purpose, and He has never once been disappointed about it. It is written down, in Isaiah 40:29, that He gives power to the faint and increases strength to them that have no might, and the same Spirit who put that line there is standing in the stone kitchen with you while you read it. Notice who that verse is for. Not the strong. The faint. Being faint is the qualification, not the disqualification.

But my God shall supply all your need according to his riches in glory by Christ Jesus.Philippians 4:19

That is the verse people reach for, and it is nearly always reached for wrongly. It is not a promise that what you give comes back around to you, and nothing in it is owed to anybody. Read what it actually says: your need, His riches, and a supply line running between the two of them that does not run dry, because the far end of it is not you.

You are being supplied, and the supply was never meant to come out of you. Philippians 4:19 already said whose riches the supply comes from, and the Spirit is not asking you to be the source of a thing He named Himself the source of.

Supply Is A Daily Word

Now the part that makes it livable, and it is a matter of timing.

The strength for this does not arrive in a lump. It never has. It arrives daily, in the amount the day needs, and it will not arrive early no matter how hard you stare at next March.

That is not a limitation in the arrangement. It is the arrangement. He fed a whole people in a wilderness on bread that came every morning and would not keep overnight, and the people who tried to store it up for a harder day found it spoiled by breakfast. You are standing in a house where the strength arrives daily and not in advance. No sentence of mine could hand you that. Scripture does, in Exodus 16:4, a day's portion every day, and His Spirit is what makes an ancient arrangement operate in a stone kitchen at ten past eleven.

Which explains the fright, actually. When you counted, you were not counting bowls. You were measuring tomorrow, and next year, and the year after that, and trying to work out whether there is enough in you to reach the far end of it. And there is not. Of course there is not. Nobody was ever handed four hundred mornings of strength at once, and the horror you felt was the entirely accurate discovery that you cannot reach that far on your own.

You have today's portion in your two hands, and today is the whole of what is being asked. That is Scripture and not sentiment, in Matthew 6:34, sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and the Holy Spirit is what makes that move in a body rather than sit in a book.

And I want to say the hard thing here, plainly, because a message about endurance that skips it is a dangerous message. None of this is a reason to stay somewhere you are being harmed. Endurance is not the answer to danger and it never was. If what is happening in your house is frightening you rather than tiring you, if you are being hurt, if you are afraid of somebody there, then patience is not what mercy is asking of you, and getting help is not a failure of love. It is the right move and it is the merciful one. Tell a doctor, a nurse, a pastor, a helpline, or emergency services, today. That is not a lesser mercy than four hundred bowls of soup. It is the same mercy pointed in the direction it needs to go.