Fifty-One Years and a Kitchen for One

The percolator will not make less than four cups. She has looked into it.

That is the thing she would tell you about first if you sat down with her, because it is small enough to say without her voice going. The pot makes four. She drinks one and a half. The rest goes down the sink at about nine o'clock, and she rinses the pot, and she sets it upside down on the towel, and that is the morning.

The kitchen is built for two people and it has been for fifty-one years. The table seats six and always did, but the two chairs at the ends are the ones with the worn arms, and the four along the sides are for company and for grandchildren and for a man from the co-op who used to come by. The salt is on the far side because he salted everything before he tasted it and she quit fighting him about it in the seventies. The radio on the windowsill still comes on at twenty till six, because he set it and she has never changed it, and she does not know if she could not change it or simply has not.

She buys the same bread. She has thought about that and cannot come up with a good reason, and she buys it anyway.

Fifty-one years. She was nineteen. There is a photograph in the hall of the two of them standing in front of a truck that neither of them owned. Fifty-one years of this kitchen, two people in it, a rhythm you do not notice you have until it is only being performed by one of you.

Now she sets one place. Plate, fork, knife, the cup. She does it quickly and she does not look at the far side of the table while she does it, and then she sits down, and she says grace out loud because she always has, and the room takes it the way an empty room takes a voice.

People have been kind. Somebody said she would learn to cook for one, and she has, and it took about eight months, and nobody tells you that learning it feels like a betrayal for the first four. Somebody else said time heals, and she smiled, because time has done a number of things in this kitchen and she is not sure that is one of them.

You have your own kitchen built for two. Maybe it is a truck with a passenger seat, or a bed with a side you do not use, or a church pew where you now take up half of what you used to. And you have your own version of a percolator that will not make less than four cups, some ordinary object that does arithmetic at you every morning without meaning to. You are living in a house that was measured for two and you are not smaller because there is one of you in it. It is written in Deuteronomy 33:27 that the eternal God is a refuge and that underneath are the everlasting arms, and it is the Holy Spirit who has been in that kitchen at twenty till six every morning since, and who has never once asked you to hurry up and be alright.

Underneath is a load-bearing word

Here is the verse, and I want you to notice where the arms are.

The eternal God is thy refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms:Deuteronomy 33:27

Not around. Not instead of. Underneath. That is a builder's word. It is the word you use about a floor joist and a foundation and the thing that takes the weight when a person can no longer take it themselves. Moses is not describing a hug at a funeral. He is describing what is holding up the floor of a life.

And look who is saying it and when. Moses is blessing the tribes at the very end of his own life, on the wrong side of a river he was told plainly he was not going to cross. He is not standing in the middle of a happy ending. He blesses them from inside a loss that was never going to be reversed, and the thing he tells them about God is not that everything works out. It is that underneath, all the way down, there are arms.

You are being held up right now by something that does not depend on the second chair being filled. That is written in Deuteronomy 33:27 in the plainest word Moses had, underneath, and it is the Holy Spirit who does the holding, in that kitchen, at nine o'clock when you pour two and a half cups of coffee down the drain.

Whole again does not mean two again

Now the hard sentence, and I am going to say it once and I am not going to take any of it back further down the page.

He is not coming back to that kitchen. Fifty-one years are over and they are not resuming. Nothing on this page is a hint, and if you have been reading carefully waiting for the turn where I tell you God has a surprise in the mail, there is no such paragraph here, and there is not going to be one, because you have been handed enough of those and you are worn out from being handed them.

And here is what restored actually means, said plain. Restored is not the same word as replaced and it is not the same word as returned. Replaced would mean somebody else in the chair with the worn arms. Returned would mean the fifty-one years starting up again on Tuesday. What God is doing is a third thing that people rarely name, and it is this: the woman is being put back together while the loss stays exactly as permanent as it is.

Whole does not mean two. Whole means whole. A person is not half of a pair with a piece missing, and grief has been telling you otherwise every morning at twenty till six for a while now, in a voice that sounds reasonable.

You have a wholeness that does not require the household to be restored, and it is not a smaller kind of wholeness. The word says the eternal God is the refuge and the everlasting arms are underneath, which is a promise about a person and not about a table setting, and it is the same Spirit who held Moses on the wrong side of that river who is holding you.

I am not asking you to feel better about it, either. If there is anger in you about how it ended, or about the eight months, or about a kind person who said time heals, keep it. It is not a spiritual problem. God has never once required a widow to be pleasant about her widowhood before He would come near her.