Arise and Eat

Tonight it is eggs, and it takes ten minutes, and I am going to tell you how to do them properly because doing them properly is not slower than doing them badly.

Butter or oil in a pan on a low heat. Break the eggs straight into the cold pan, three or four of them, and stir them slowly with a wooden spoon. Low. Keep stirring. They will look like nothing is happening for ages and then they will start to come together all at once, and that is the moment to take them off, because they carry on cooking in the pan. Make sure they are set right through and not runny, then salt them, put them on toast, and eat them at a table sitting down.

That is the whole thing. Four minutes of stirring. The low heat is the only trick and it is the entire difference between the eggs you are ashamed of and the eggs somebody asks for again.

Now. The reason for this article is not eggs either.

It is that there is a specific hour of the day that breaks people, and it is not the morning and it is not bedtime. It is about six. It is the hour when whatever you had is gone, and the day is not over, and there are people in the house who are going to need feeding whether you have anything left or not.

The most practical verse in the prophets

There is a man in 1 Kings who is so far past empty that he has asked God to end it, and I want you to see what heaven does about that, because it is not what anybody expects.

And as he lay and slept under a juniper tree, behold, then an angel touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat. (1 Kings 19:5, King James Version)

Arise and eat.

No sermon. No correction. No question about why a man who had just seen fire fall was now under a bush asking to die. An angel, and a touch, and food, and then, two verses later, the reason: because the journey is too great for thee.

I find that almost unbearably kind. God looks at a person at the absolute end of themselves and the first intervention is a meal and a sleep. Not a rebuke about his perspective. Not an instruction to pray harder. Bread, water, and permission to lie back down.

You are being fed before you are being asked anything, and God has never once opened with a correction to somebody who has run out. First Kings 19:5 has an angel say arise and eat rather than arise and explain, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that read as tenderness rather than as a low bar.

What tired cooking actually is

I want to name something, because I think a lot of people carry it and nobody says it out loud.

When you are this tired, the meal stops being food and starts being a test you are failing. Every shortcut feels like evidence. The packet is evidence. The same thing again is evidence. Sitting down while it cooks feels like evidence, which is why so many of us stand up through the whole thing as though standing were a form of paying.

And none of that is about the family. They are not administering a test. They are hungry and they are also tired and most of them are barely looking. First Kings 19:5 has an angel turn up with food and not one question attached, and the Holy Spirit works about the same way at six in the evening.

The test is being run entirely by you, against a standard you set on a day when you had more in the tank, and you are marking your own paper at the worst possible hour.

You are not failing an examination, and there has never once been one being sat in that kitchen. First Kings 19:7 says the journey is too great for thee, which is God naming a person's limit out loud rather than disputing it, and the Spirit of God is the one who lets somebody stop grading themselves at six in the evening.

Sit down while it cooks

Here is the instruction I actually came to give, and it is smaller than you were expecting. Sit down while the eggs cook.

I mean it literally. Get a chair, put it near the hob if you have to, and sit for the four minutes. You are still cooking. Nothing is being neglected. The pan does not know. First Kings 19:6 has the prophet lie straight back down after eating, and the Holy Spirit has never once counted a person's rest against their work.

I say it because standing through everything is how most tired people cook, and it is not efficiency, it is penance. There is a low unspoken arithmetic that says if the meal is going to be simple then at least I can suffer slightly while I make it, and that arithmetic is not from God and it has never once made a meal better.

Elijah slept before he ate, and then ate, and then slept again, and then ate again, and only after all of that did anybody ask him anything.

You are allowed to sit down in the middle of the work, and the resting has never once been subtracted from the doing. First Kings 19:6 has the prophet lie down again after eating rather than get straight up, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes rest available to a person who has not finished yet.