It Needed Explaining So I Stopped

He noticed the shopping list, of all things, and it took him two minutes to work out what he was looking at.

He was writing it out for a Saturday when people were coming, and it was the same list he has written for about four years, and every single thing on it was neutral.

Not bad. He is a good cook and it is always good. It is simply that nothing on that list has ever required a single word of explanation from anybody.

And there is a way he cooks that his mother taught him, that nobody at his table has eaten in four years, and he stopped without ever deciding to stop.

Because it needed explaining. Every time.

Not in a hostile way. Nobody was ever anything other than interested. That is the part he wants understood, because he has told the shortened version of this to one friend and the friend immediately assumed somebody had been rude, and nobody has ever been rude about anything.

It was: what is that? And then he would say. And then, what is in it? And then he would say. And then somebody would ask about his family, kindly, and somebody else would say they had had something similar once, and it would be entirely warm, and it would take eleven minutes.

Eleven minutes of the evening, every time, with him at the center of it, explaining.

And after doing that about forty times he found that he had started writing a different shopping list, and that the new list produced an evening where he could just sit down and eat with his friends like everybody else at the table.

He said out loud to the fridge: I traded it for an easier evening.

You know that list.

Maybe it is not food. Maybe it is music you do not put on, or a phrase you do not use, or something about your week you do not mention because mentioning it starts a conversation you have had two hundred times.

Nobody took anything off you. That is the whole difficulty of this one. You put it down yourself, for a reason that made sense, and the reason still makes sense, and you have quietly become less of yourself in your own dining room.

Look at what they are still wearing

Here is the last big gathering scene in the whole book, and the detail everybody reads past is the one that matters here.

After this I beheld, and, lo, a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, stood before the throne, and before the Lamb, clothed with white robes, and palms in their hands.Revelation 7:9

Of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues.

That is four words for the same thing, stacked, and the stacking is deliberate. He is not saying a large number of people. He is saying that at the last possible moment, in front of the throne, the crowd is still describable in those terms.

Nations, still. Tongues, still. Not formerly of all nations. Not once diverse and now resolved.

They are all in white and they are all doing the same thing and they are still, plurally, from somewhere.

You are part of a gathering that stays plural all the way to the end. That is what the four stacked words in Revelation 7:9 preserve, distinction inside unity at the final scene (Revelation 7:9), and it is the Holy Spirit who is the one gathering out of every nation, and He has never once required anybody to become unmarked on the way in.

The trade you made was real

Now let me be honest about the arithmetic, because you did not do anything stupid.

Eleven minutes of explaining is a genuine cost. It is a cost you pay and nobody else at the table pays, and paying it forty times is not nothing, and wanting one evening where you get to be a person eating with friends rather than an exhibit is entirely reasonable.

That was a real trade and you made it for a real reason.

You have not been ashamed of anything, and what you did was tiredness rather than embarrassment. Scripture says he knoweth our frame; he remembereth that we are dust (Psalm 103:14), and it is the Holy Spirit who applies that to a man with a shopping list, and He was not standing in the supermarket disappointed in anybody.

The only thing worth noticing is what four years of a sensible trade adds up to, which is a table where nothing of yours is served.

And nothing here tells you to make a point of it

Let me be plain. Nothing on this page tells you to put it back permanently, or to make a thing of it, or to explain to your friends what you have been doing, or to be different in your own house on principle.

And nothing here tells you what you should keep or what any household ought to observe, in any direction, because that is not this site's business.

You are not being handed a practice or a stand. The word says whether therefore ye eat, or drink, or whatsoever ye do, do all to the glory of God (1 Corinthians 10:31), and there is no prescription attached to that anywhere, and it is His Spirit who leads a person in particulars that no page could know.