The Same Three Things Since I Moved Out

There are three.

You would not put it that way out loud, but there are three, and you know exactly what they are, and you have been going around them since the week you moved out.

One of them involves a jar. One of them is a sandwich that got slightly upgraded at some point. One of them is the thing you make when a friend is coming over, which is also the thing you make when nobody is coming over.

And it works. Nobody has ever gone hungry in that apartment. You are not in trouble.

But there is a small thing that happens when somebody asks what you cook, and you do the shrug, and you say something about being a disaster in the kitchen, and everybody laughs, and the moment goes past.

And the reason you do the shrug is that the true answer is three, and three sounds like a number somebody would be concerned about.

So let me say the first thing plainly, before anything practical.

Nobody in this article is going to suggest that a man your age should already be cooking properly.

There is no age when this becomes shameful. There is no moment where the window quietly shuts. Nobody handed you a set of skills on the way out of that house, because mostly nobody hands anybody anything, and the people you know who cook well mostly learned it somewhere you did not happen to be standing.

Three is not a diagnosis. Three is a rotation that worked, kept running because it worked, and never got added to because nothing ever made you add to it.

Prepare thy work without

There is a line in Proverbs about the order things go in, and it is unglamorous in a way that helps here.

Prepare thy work without, and make it fit for thyself in the field; and afterwards build thine house. (Proverbs 24:27, King James Version)

Prepare thy work without. And afterwards build.

It is a sentence about sequence. Get the ground ready, get the field doing what a field does, and the house comes after that. Nobody in the verse is behind schedule. Nobody is being told they should have built already.

And the quiet thing in it is that there is an order, which means there is a first step, which means the first step is a real and legitimate place to be standing.

You are standing at a first step rather than behind a deadline, and an order of operations has never once been a report on how late you are. Proverbs 24:27 puts the field before the house and never once rushes the man doing it, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody opening the same jar on a Tuesday.

And notice what the verse does not do.

It does not describe the house. It does not tell the man how many rooms, or when, or what the neighbors will think of it. It stays on the next thing.

Which is worth borrowing, because the picture in your head is a finished kitchen with somebody competent in it, and that picture is a house you are trying to build without a field.

You have a next thing rather than a finished house to produce, and a picture of somebody competent has never once been the measure of a Tuesday evening. The Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been comparing himself to a photograph, and Proverbs 24:27 keeps a man on the ground in front of him instead of the building behind it.

Three is a habit and not a ceiling

Here is the practical half, and it is one correction.

Three is not what you can do. Three is what got done, repeatedly, because it is what got done last time.

That distinction changes everything. If three is a ceiling, then anything above it needs a different kind of person, and that person is not you, and so the correct move is the shrug and the joke. If three is a habit, then four is one evening away, and nothing about you has to change first.

And here is the thing about habits that the shrug hides from you. Those three meals were once new. There was a week where the jar one was unfamiliar and you did it anyway. There was a first time you made the sandwich thing, and it was probably worse than it is now, and nobody filmed it.

You were a beginner three separate times already and survived every one of them, and a thing done badly the first time has never once stayed that way. Proverbs 24:27 has a man work the field before the house and treats the field as real work, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody who has forgotten he has done this before.

You already did the only hard part of this, three separate times, before your twenty second birthday.

Adding a fourth is not a new category of act. It is the thing you already did, once more, on an evening when you are slightly bored.

You were adding to a list long before anybody asked you to be good at this, and three things learned quietly has never once been the ceiling of a person. The Holy Spirit is the one who is with somebody who has been calling a habit a limit, and Proverbs 24:27 has a man working the ground he is actually on.

And one more thing, which matters more than the pan.

Do not pick something ambitious. The instinct, once somebody says add a fourth, is to go and find something impressive, and then the evening becomes a test, and you fail it, and the three becomes a fortress.

Pick something dull. Something with about four items in it. Something a person makes on a weeknight without telling anybody.

You have permission to make something unremarkable tonight, and an ambitious first attempt has never once been the safer choice. The written instruction in Proverbs 24:27 is to prepare the field first rather than to build something worth photographing, and the Spirit of God is the one present with somebody deliberately keeping it small.

What a fourth thing actually looks like

So here is the assignment, and it is smaller than it sounds.

Cook one thing tonight that is not on your list of three, and eat it sitting down.

Tonight. One thing. And keep it genuinely plain: rice with an egg on it. Pasta with butter and cheese and pepper. Something in a pan with an onion in it that ends up on toast. Do not go out and get anything, and use what is in that kitchen, which after a normal week is more than you think.

It may not be good. That is expected, and it is information about a first attempt rather than information about you, and every one of your existing three went through exactly this evening once.

You have three finished examples of this exact evening behind you, and a first attempt that came out badly has never once stopped a thing becoming ordinary. The Spirit of God is the one at that stove with somebody doing it for the fourth time in his life, and Proverbs 24:27 puts the field before the house without calling the field a lesser stage.

Then the part that does the work, and it will feel unnecessary. Eat it sitting down.

Not standing at the counter with the pan. Not walking around. Sitting, with the food on a plate, for as long as it takes to finish it.

You are making a fourth thing real by sitting down with it, and a meal eaten standing at a counter has never once been allowed to count. Proverbs 24:27 has the field prepared and then the house, in that order and with nothing skipped, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is at that table with a plate on it.