The Habit of a Lean Year

Her granddaughter said it in the kitchen last month, not meaning anything by it, in the way that twenty year olds say things.

Nan, that is the smallest bit of cake I have ever seen.

And everybody laughed, including her, and she cut another one and it was fine and nothing happened. And she has thought about it every day since.

Because she looked at the plate afterwards, when they had gone through, and she saw what her hands had done without asking her. It was a slice you would cut if there were fourteen people and one cake. There were four of them and two cakes, one of which was in a tin because she had made two, because she always makes two.

The lean years were from when she was thirty one to when she was about forty three. She does not talk about them much and would tell you other people had it worse, which is what women of her generation always say and is not always true. Twelve years of a very particular kind of arithmetic in a house with three children and a husband whose work came and went with the weather.

She got them through it. Everybody ate every day. That is a thing she is entitled to say and does not say.

And her hands learned to cut a slice a certain size, and they have never once forgotten it, in thirty years of not needing to.

She has a full freezer now and a pension and a garden that does more than she can use. And she cuts cake as though the winter of 1972 is still going on outside the door.

You know that plate. Yours might be the tea bag used twice, or the heating going on later than it needs to, or the way you buy the smaller size of something you use every day. Somebody taught your hands a rule in a hard stretch, and the hard stretch ended, and nobody ever told your hands.

Come and sit down at the table. The pot is on. There is one line about the manna years that says out loud what they were for.

There is no code, and there is a teaching

Let me say it plain first, because the name over this door promises a secret and I am not going to leave a woman sitting here waiting for one.

There is no code. There is nothing in Scripture that fills a larder by a formula, and nothing here is a technique. And I will say the next thing straight out, because it matters: if there is genuinely not enough in your house tonight, nothing here tells you to be comfortable with that, and Scripture does not tell you that either. This is written to the woman who has plenty and cannot let her hands know.

Here is the line, and it is Moses looking back at forty years of daily bread and telling them what it was for.

And he humbled thee, and suffered thee to hunger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might make thee know that man doth not live by bread only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of the LORD doth man live.Deuteronomy 8:3

That he might make thee know. It was teaching. It was not a punishment and it was not scarcity for its own sake. It was a school, and it had a curriculum, and the subject was that a life does not actually rest on the bread.

Now read the sentence that comes after it in that chapter, because people always stop too early. He goes on to describe the land they are going into, and it is a land of wheat and barley and vines and fig trees and pomegranates, where they will eat bread without scarceness and not lack anything.

The same God ran both. The manna years and the pomegranate years. He was not different in the second one, and He did not expect them to keep gathering an omer a day in a land full of orchards.

You were being taught in the lean years and you were never being kept small, and the same God runs a full table. That is not a soft thing I am saying to be kind to you. It is written into Deuteronomy 8, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes a chapter about two very different decades and lays it on a woman looking at a plate after everybody has gone through.

You have today, and today is met, and it is a fuller today than the one your hands were trained in. Scripture says a land where thou shalt eat bread without scarceness, and His Spirit is the one who lets an old woman's hands believe a sentence like that at last.

Now let me say the true thing, since we are the only ones in here.

It is not meanness and it is not thrift and both of us know that. It is that your hands are still on duty. Twelve years of standing between three children and a bad winter does not switch off because the winter ends, and nobody ever comes to a woman and says, formally, it is finished now, you can cut a proper slice.

And there is something else under it, and I will say it because somebody should. Cutting small was how you loved them. Every thin slice was you making it go round, and going round was the whole of your work for twelve years, and to cut a fat slice now feels, somewhere underneath, like saying that all of it was unnecessary.

It was necessary. It was the making of that family. And it is finished.

You are not being disloyal to the woman you were, and a full slice does not undo one thing she did. Scripture says to everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven, and that includes the season that ended, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman leave a season without feeling that she is leaving herself.

And now what I owe you about your mouth, because thirty years of a hand does not change because an old woman said something warm over a pot. Jesus said faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, does what noticing never does on its own. So say it out loud, here, in your own kitchen. You have the standing to speak to a habit and tell it what it is not, because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and Scripture calls that yours by position and not by long service, and the Holy Spirit takes a spoken word further than a farmhouse door.