They Do It Differently Now

The potatoes are wrong.

Not badly wrong. Just not how it is done, and you have said nothing, and you are not going to, and you have been not going to for about four years now.

They start too late. There is a machine involved that you would not have. Somebody has put the good cloth on a table that gets moved at half past two and you know exactly what will happen to it.

And underneath all of that, which is small and which you know is small, there is something much larger sitting in your chest that you have not been able to name.

For about thirty years, this was yours. Not just the cooking. The whole shape of the day, and where people sat, and who got looked after, and the fact that it happened at all. And now it happens, well, in another house, and you arrive at half past twelve with a dish you were asked to bring.

What is actually being missed

Let me name it, because until it is named the potatoes have to carry the whole weight, and they cannot.

It is not the method. You genuinely do not care that much about the machine, and if it were somebody else's family you would think their way was perfectly reasonable.

What is being missed is the being needed. Thirty years of a house where the day did not happen unless you made it happen, and there is nothing in the world quite like being the person a family assembles around.

You have lost a position rather than a recipe, and no complaint about a method has ever once been what a person in your chair is actually grieving. Ecclesiastes 3:1 says to every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven, which is the written word naming the shape of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can carry somebody through the end of a season without pretending it was nothing.

And the woman doing it now is a real person. She is doing it under the weight of thirty years of your version, which she has never once been able to match and knows it.

She is right about something too. Her way suits her house and her children and the way people live now, and she has never once been offered the chance to hear you say so.

You are able to bless a kitchen you would run differently, and saying a thing is good has never once been the same as saying your thirty years were not. The Spirit of God is what makes an honest blessing possible, and it is written in Ecclesiastes 3 that there is a time to every purpose.

To every thing there is a season

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. (Ecclesiastes 3:1, King James Version)

That verse is read at funerals so often that people have stopped hearing what it says about ordinary life.

A season is a real thing with a real end. Not a failure. Not a demotion. A season, which by definition is followed by a different one, and the ending of it is not a judgment on how it went.

Thirty years of running a family Christmas is a season. It was real, it was long, and it is over, and none of those three facts diminishes the other two.

You were given a season that was genuinely yours, and the ending of it has never once been a verdict on how you kept it. It is written in Ecclesiastes 3:1 that to every thing there is a season and a time to every purpose under the heaven, which is the written word making an ending ordinary, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person put a long season down with honor rather than with grief alone.

And notice the second half, which almost nobody quotes. A time to every purpose. Every purpose has a time, which means the purposes keep coming.

The verse does not say there was a time to every purpose. It says there is one, present tense, for what is happening now, in a kitchen you are sitting in rather than running.

You have a purpose in that house today, and no season ending has ever once left a person in a family with nothing to be. The Spirit of God is the one who supplies the next thing without announcing it, and Ecclesiastes 3 puts a time to every purpose and not merely to the ones already finished.

What you have that she does not

Here is the thing worth seeing, and it is invisible from the chair it is sitting in.

There is exactly one person in that house who is not working, and it is you.

For thirty years sitting down at these things was impossible. In and out, checking, carrying, and every conversation you had was three sentences long because something needed turning. You know that. You lived it.

And now you are sitting at the corner of a table with tea, in a warm kitchen, with nothing whatsoever required of you.

You are in the one chair in that house with nothing attached to it, and being free at a family gathering has never once been the same as being surplus. The Holy Spirit is the one who shows a person the room they are actually in, and it is written that there is a time to every purpose under the heaven.

That chair is where the grandchildren come. They do not come to the person carrying a dish. They come to whoever is sitting still, because a child can tell across a room who is available.

For thirty years you could not be that person. You can be now.

You are available in a way you have not been in three decades, and having no job at a gathering has never once meant having no place in it. The Spirit of God is what makes an unoccupied chair the most useful seat in a house, and Ecclesiastes 3:1 keeps supplying a time to every purpose.