The Cupboard I Keep Full Twice Over

There are eleven tins of tomatoes. He counted them in the spring, moving them to get at something, and then he stood there for a moment and then he went on with what he was doing.

There is nothing wrong with eleven tins of tomatoes. That is what he would say. They keep. They get used. Nobody is hurt by a full cupboard, and he grew up in a house where a full cupboard would have been a miracle, so if anything it is a good thing, it is a sign of how far a family can come in one generation.

And every Thursday he stands in an aisle and feels it.

It is not a thought. He has tried to catch it as a thought and it is not one. It is closer to a pressure at the back of the chest that arrives when he looks at a shelf and knows that he has the money and there is no shortage and nothing whatsoever is happening, and his hand still reaches for the second one.

He was nine when it was worst. He remembers the specific arrangement of the kitchen and the way his mother used to talk brightly while she was working out how to make a thing go round four people. He remembers being told that they had eaten before, at somebody else's house, when they had not.

He has three children who have never once been told that.

And on the good days he can look at the cupboard and see forty years of work in it. And on the Thursdays, in the aisle, it is not forty years of work, it is a wall he is building against a year that ended a very long time ago.

You know that aisle. Yours might be a freezer, or a drawer of batteries, or a habit of filling the car up when it is half full. Somebody in your history was short, possibly you, and you built a defense, and the defense worked, and now the defense runs on a timetable that nobody set.

Come and sit. There is tea and there is bread on the table and both of them are there to be eaten today. There is a story about food that could not be kept overnight, and it is stranger than most people notice.

There is no code, and there is a day's portion

Let me say the plain thing first, because the name over the door of this site promises a secret and I will not keep a man reading in hope of one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that guarantees a full shelf, and nothing here is a technique. And I will say the next thing carefully, because it matters: if you are actually short tonight, if there is nothing in the cupboard, this article does not tell you to be at peace with that. Scripture does not tell you that either. This is written to the man who has today and cannot feel it, and if the shelf is empty, you are not the one being spoken to.

Here is what happened in the desert. Food arrived every morning. Not weekly. Every morning, in the exact quantity needed, and the instruction that came with it was extraordinary.

And Moses said, Let no man leave of it till the morning. Notwithstanding they hearkened not unto Moses; but some of them left of it until the morning, and it bred worms, and stank.Exodus 16:19-20

Now, most people read that as a warning about disobedience. Look at it as a father would look at it.

God feeds a nation of people who have just come out of slavery, where they had no control over food at all, and He deliberately gives it in a form that cannot be stockpiled. He could have given them a warehouse. He gave them a morning, and then another morning, and then another, for forty years.

That is not stinginess and it is not a test. It is training. Those people had been taught by their whole lives that supply is precarious and belongs to somebody else, and He set out to teach their hands something different, and He did it by giving them today, every single day, until their bodies believed it.

You are not being told to trust a warehouse, and God has never once required you to be less careful before He would feed you. That is not a comfort I have arranged over tea. It is written into Exodus 16, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a rule about morning bread and lays it beside eleven tins of tomatoes.

You have today, and today is met. Scripture says gather every man according to his eating, which is a measure fitted to a person rather than to a fear, and His Spirit is the one who makes an old measure land in a chest that goes tight in an aisle.

Now let me name the thing gently, because there is a boy in this story and he deserves respect.

That pressure in the aisle is nine years old. It is not greed and it is not lack of faith, and I want to say plainly that nobody in this article is going to tell you that a man who buys two of everything has a faith problem. He has a memory. The memory was formed in a real kitchen by a real shortage, and it did its job, and it kept a boy alert in a house where alertness was useful.

The trouble is that it has never been told the year is over. Nobody ever came and said it. So it goes on working, on a Thursday, in a shop full of food, for a family that has never gone without.

You are not that boy any more, and the year that trained your hands ended a long time ago. Scripture says that God is a father of the fatherless and a judge of the widows, and that He setteth the solitary in families, which means He was in that kitchen and He saw the whole of it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a man be looked after now rather than only remembering.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because forty years of a habit does not stop because a friend was kind over bread. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what buying two never does. So speak, out loud, in your own kitchen. You have the standing to speak to an old fear and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position rather than by provision, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a larder door.