I Am In The Kitchen Listening To The Room

You can hear them from where you are standing.

Not the words. The shape of it. The rise, the pause, somebody starting a story, the particular noise a room makes when everybody has stopped watching the door and settled.

And you are four steps away, at a counter, with your back to it.

You are not being left out. That is the strange part and it is why you have never said anything. Anybody in that room would tell you to come and sit down. Three of them have said so already today, and they meant it, and you said in a minute, and you meant that too.

But the minute does not come, and the reason it does not come is that there is always one more thing, and the one more thing is real. Somebody has to do it. It genuinely does have to be done now, and the doing of it is what makes the room in there work.

So you stand at a counter listening to a party you are hosting.

And by the end of the day you will have been in the same building as everybody you love for nine hours and had about six minutes of them.

I want to name something before we go any further, because I think it has never been said in your hearing. That is a real loss, and it happens every year, and nobody has noticed it, including you, because you have been calling it being busy.

Cumbered about much serving

There is a scene where a woman says out loud the thing that never gets said in a kitchen, and the interesting part is what Jesus does not say back.

But Martha was cumbered about much serving, and came to him, and said, Lord, dost thou not care that my sister hath left me to serve alone? bid her therefore that she help me. (Luke 10:40, King James Version)

Cumbered. Weighed down, encumbered, dragged about by. That is the word chosen, and it is a physical word about being pulled in several directions by things that are all legitimate.

And look what she does. She does not sulk in a kitchen. She comes out, and she says the true thing, and she says it to the right person, and she is not struck down for it.

There is a whole tradition of using this passage to tell women in kitchens that they are doing the wrong thing, and I am not going to do that to you tonight. The word is cumbered. The problem named in the text is the weight, not the serving.

You are allowed to come out of the kitchen and say the true thing, and Luke 10:40 has a woman do exactly that and no rebuke lands on her for saying it. The written word keeps her sentence in the record, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes the accusation off a woman who has been told this passage was aimed at her.

And notice her actual complaint, because it is precise and it is yours.

You have been serving alone in a room next door to everybody, and it is written into Luke 10:40 that the loneliness of it was the thing she brought. Scripture preserves the words to serve alone rather than the words too much work, and the Spirit of God is the one who tells the difference for a woman who has been mixing them up for years.

It was never the work

Let me be exact about the loss, because vagueness will make you feel guilty and guilt will make you work harder.

You do not mind the work. It suits you, you would do it again, and a version of this day where somebody else did all of it would not actually be better; you would spend the whole time in there listening for something going wrong in here.

What you mind is missing the room.

Those two things get collapsed into one, and once they are collapsed the only solutions anybody offers are about the work: do less, delegate, buy something ready made. And every one of those misses, because the work was never the injury.

You were never asking for less to do, and Scripture has Martha name being alone rather than being busy. Luke 10:40 puts the word alone in her mouth, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is present when a woman finally identifies what she has actually been missing.

And here is the mechanism that keeps it going, which is worth seeing plainly. Every task in that kitchen is small and finishable, and the room is not. A task says: four minutes and you are done. The room says: come and be here for an unspecified time with no clear end.

So the tasks win, every hour, all day, because they are the ones with edges. That is not devotion and it is not avoidance. It is arithmetic, and it will run the same way next year unless something interrupts it.

You have been losing to a line of small finishable things, and the written word never once suggests a woman must finish everything before she is permitted to sit. Luke 10:40 records the interruption rather than the completion, and the Spirit of God is the one who breaks a loop a person cannot see from inside it.

Carry the chair in

So here is the assignment, and it is deliberately physical, because a decision about this will not survive contact with a full kitchen.

Carry a chair into the room where the people are, and sit in it for ten minutes.

Not: come and sit down when it is all finished. That is the sentence everybody says, and it has never once worked, because it never is.

Carry the chair. Sit in it. Ten minutes on a clock if you need it to be a number.

You are able to sit down before the work is finished, and it has never once been required that the counter be clear first. Luke 10:40 has a woman leave the serving mid task to say something true, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with a woman carrying a chair through a doorway feeling faintly ridiculous.

I want you to notice what carrying the chair does that accepting an invitation does not. An invitation asks you to judge whether now is a reasonable time, and now is never a reasonable time. A chair carried in is a decision already made, in your hands, physically, and it is much harder to talk yourself out of a thing you are already holding.

And do not announce it. Do not say I am taking ten minutes. That turns it into a statement about the household and somebody will feel got at.

You are making one decision with your hands rather than a case with your mouth, and the written word puts the weight of this on the cumbering rather than on anybody's fault. Luke 10:40 names a woman's own condition and not her sister's character, and the Spirit of God is the one who keeps a small good decision from turning into an argument.