Six Lives Before Breakfast

The kettle takes about ninety seconds, and in that time she has been inside six other lives.

Not on purpose. She came down for coffee. She is standing in her own kitchen in the good early light with her elbows on the counter and her hair still flat on one side, and the day has not properly started. And in the time it takes water to come to a boil she learns that a woman she went to school with has moved somewhere with a view, that a couple she likes are somewhere hot and laughing, that a man she has not spoken to in nine years has done a thing she did not know he was capable of and everybody is delighted about it. Then she looks up and out over the fence, and her neighbor's car is new.

Six lives. It is seven minutes past seven.

Here is the part that is hard to say kindly, so I will just say it plainly. Nothing in her is being unpleasant about any of them. She is glad. That is the strange part. She is genuinely, warmly glad, and she would defend all six of them in a room full of people, and at the same time something in her chest has quietly gone flat, the way a room goes flat when somebody switches off one lamp.

She looks around her own kitchen. It is fine. It is more than fine. The light coming across the counter is beautiful and she has not noticed it once. The bread is out. Her son's bag is by the door where he dropped it last night and did not pick up. And the kitchen is exactly the same kitchen it was ninety seconds ago, and somehow it has been marked down.

Then the arithmetic starts, and it is quick, and it is quiet, and she has done it so often that it hardly feels like thinking. She is not behind, exactly. She is just not where any of that is. And she notices that she is running her own morning as an exhibit now, holding it up against the others, checking whether it would survive being looked at.

The toast comes up. She butters it standing there and she is not hungry for it, and she eats about half, and afterward she could not tell you what it tasted of.

Maybe that is your morning. Maybe you have been up forty minutes and you have already stood in six kitchens that were not yours and come back to your own with the light gone slightly out of it, and you cannot even be angry about it, because you are glad for every one of them. And somewhere in the last few weeks you have started to suspect there is something wrong with the machinery in you.

The looking is not the problem

I want to say the true thing first, because there is a version of this page that starts by telling you to look at less, and that version has helped nobody at a counter at seven in the morning.

Nobody here is going to shame you for looking. Wanting to see other people's lives is not a defect; it is what a person made for company does, and half of what you saw this morning you saw because you love those people and you like knowing. The looking is not the wound.

What did the damage was a ruler. Somewhere between the second life and the sixth, an instrument came out, and every single thing in your kitchen got measured against a version of six other kitchens that had been photographed on their best morning. And what a ruler does, all a ruler does, is rank. It cannot feed anybody. It has no capacity to.

Now here is what Paul writes to people doing exactly this, and read it carefully, because it is not the sentence you expect.

But let every man prove his own work, and then shall he have rejoicing in himself alone, and not in another.Galatians 6:4

He does not say stop looking. He does not tell them to be less interested in each other; the whole letter is soaked in how much they matter to each other. He takes the ruler out of their hands and gives them a different instrument. Prove your own work, he says. Assay it. Weigh it on its own bench, on its own terms, for what it actually is.

You are holding a life that God intends to be weighed on its own bench, and it has never once been graded against somebody else's best morning. Galatians 6:4 says each one proves his own work and finds his rejoicing there, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line about proving and hands it to a woman at a counter with the toast going cold.

And notice where Paul puts the joy. Not in coming out ahead. In the work itself, seen honestly, on its own. That is a completely different economy from the one you were standing in at seven minutes past seven, and it is the one you were made for.

You have a rejoicing that is available to you this morning without one thing in your kitchen changing. It is written that the rejoicing is in his own work and not in another, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that sentence stop being advice and start being breakfast.

He opens His hand

Now the second thing, and it is what the ruler could never do.

A measurement tells you where something ranks. It has no ability whatsoever to fill you, and yet almost everyone I know has spent years running the measurement over and over as though eventually it would come back with a number that satisfied them. It will not. That is not the ruler being cruel. It is a ruler being a ruler.

Here is the instrument that does feed people.

Thou openest thine hand, and satisfiest the desire of every living thing.Psalm 145:16

Open hand. Not a scoreboard, not a ranking, not a comparison of one creature against another. An open hand, and a desire being satisfied, and the psalm says every living thing, which takes in the woman with the view and the couple in the heat and the man everybody is delighted about, and it also takes in you, at your own counter, with your own bread out.

You are being satisfied out of an open hand this morning, and there is no line in front of it and no ranking to clear first. Psalm 145:16 says He opens His hand and satisfies the desire of every living thing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns a line about every living thing into your kitchen and your morning and the light you had not looked at.

I want to be careful here, because I am not telling you that what you saw was fake and yours is secretly better. That is only the ruler again, turned around. The view is real. The laughing was real. Be glad; you already are, and that gladness is one of the best things about you.

You were given a life that is not in competition with the six you saw, and the gladness you felt for them is not a debt you owe on your own. It is written that He satisfies the desire of every living thing, and every is a word that leaves nobody standing outside, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes room at a table wide enough for all seven of you.