The Cupboard I Keep Filling

Simone counted it once, on a Sunday, because she had started to suspect something, and then she wished she had not counted it.

Nine bags of pasta. Fourteen tins of chopped tomatoes. Rice in three different sizes of packet including one that has been there long enough to have moved house with her. Two of everything under the sink even though the second one has never once been needed before the first ran out, because it never gets to run out.

Nobody in her building would call her a hoarder. That is the thing. The cupboard is neat. It is organized. It looks, to anybody who opens it, like a woman who is on top of her life, and she is on top of her life, and she has a job she is good at and a car that starts and there is nothing wrong.

What nobody sees is the small physical relief, right in the middle of the chest, when she puts the fifteenth tin in, and how quickly it goes.

She was eleven when it was bad. She remembers a particular Thursday, and a particular sound her mother made in the next room on the phone, and being told at ten past eight in the morning to say she had already eaten if anybody at school asked.

She is thirty-six now. She has never gone hungry as an adult, not one day, not once.

And she buys the fifteenth tin.

What got her was her flatmate's little boy, who is four and does not understand cupboards or years or anything else. He was in the kitchen while she was putting the shopping away and he watched her stack it and he said, in the flat interested voice of a four year old: is it all for today?

Is it all for today?

Simone stood in her own kitchen holding a tin in each hand and had to put them down on the counter and stand still for a moment, and she could not have explained it to a single adult she knows.

And the sentence that arrived, standing there, had nothing to do with the shopping.

She thought: I have been buying for a Thursday in 2001, and a four year old just asked me what today needs.

Let me say the word properly first

Before anything else I want to be plain about what wealth means on this site, because the word is slippery and I would rather be clear than clever with a woman standing in her own kitchen.

Wealth here means a portion. Not a balance, not a stock, not a shelf you can see the back of. A portion is the old table word for what is set down in front of somebody because they belong at that table, and Scripture takes that ordinary word and does something outrageous with it: God says of certain people that He Himself is their portion. That is the only sense the word carries here.

And this article is written for one specific reader, so let me say exactly who. It is for the person who has enough and cannot feel it. If you are actually short, if the cupboard is genuinely bare and the fear is telling you the plain truth, then nothing here is asking you to be content with that, and an article that did would deserve to be thrown away. Real lack is real and it deserves a real answer, and impossibleharvest.com in this same family is built for exactly that. What I want to look at is the fifteenth tin in a full cupboard, and I would rather the word of God did the looking, with the Holy Spirit doing the work, than that I guessed.

The bread that refused to be stored

There is a stretch in Exodus that is one of the strangest things God has ever done on purpose, and it is not usually taught as kindness.

And Moses said to them, Let no one leave any of it over till the morning. But they did not listen to Moses. Some left part of it till the morning, and it bred worms and stank. And Moses was angry with them. Morning by morning they gathered it, each as much as he could eat.Exodus 16:19-21

Now, God could have sent a year's supply. He is not short of options. He sent breakfast, every morning, for forty years, and He built into it a property that made storing it impossible.

That was not a punishment and it was not a test of nerve. It was a lesson taught with food, every single morning, for a generation: you are not being supplied by a stock. You are being supplied by a Person, and a Person has to be met, and meeting Him is the actual point of the arrangement.

You are not weak or greedy for the cupboard. You are somebody whose body learned, at eleven, that the shelf is the difference between safety and a Thursday, and it has been acting on that ever since. The written word does not scold you for that, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the difference between knowing a thing about manna and being able to close a cupboard door and walk away.

And here is what is true of you already, this evening, with the shopping half unpacked. You have today, and the word says the day's portion is gathered morning by morning, and the Spirit is the one who makes that a felt fact rather than an interesting piece of history.

What the fifteenth tin is actually for

Think about what got you at that counter. It wasn't the tins. You'd have told that boy what was in every one of them.

It was a four year old asking is it all for today, and meaning nothing by it at all. It was the sudden view of your own kitchen from outside the year you have been living in. You were starving to be back in today. You still are, and the written word treats that hunger as reasonable rather than as weakness, and it is the Holy Spirit who says so to a person and not merely about them.

That is the honest thing under the habit. The cupboard is not being asked for food. It is being asked to guarantee that a Thursday will not happen again, and no shelf on earth can do that, which is exactly why the relief goes so fast.

Here is what the word has already settled about you, so that His Spirit can settle it in you tonight. You were never given the job of guaranteeing your own future. Jesus told people to ask for daily bread and did not add a clause about a reserve, and He was in that kitchen while the shopping was still in the bags.