Taste and See, in a Kitchen at Eleven

The laptop is propped on a cookbook, which is the arrangement, because the cookbook is exactly the right thickness and no other book in the house is.

Eleven at night. Her mother's face fills most of the screen and part of a lampshade. Behind her the window is black and there is a mug going cold by the mouse mat that she made at half past nine.

Her mother is telling her about the neighbor and the tree. It is a long story with a lot of setup and there will be a good bit at the end.

And she is listening. She genuinely is. She says the right things and she laughs at the tree.

But about forty percent of her is in tomorrow. She is in the meeting at ten. She is in the thing she has to send before the meeting at ten. She is in the conversation she will have to have if the thing she sends does not land.

It is always like this. It has been like this for a while. She is never entirely in the room she is in, because part of her is always ahead, scouting, checking the road.

Her mother says: anyway. How are you, really.

And she says fine, and means it, and has absolutely no idea.

Come and sit at the counter with me a minute. Because there is a line in a psalm that is famous and is almost always read as a metaphor, and I want you to notice what it actually asks you to do.

You cannot taste something later

Here is the line.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.Psalm 34:8

Taste. Of all the verbs available, that one.

He could have said understand. He could have said consider, or conclude, or remember. Those are all things a person can do about something at a distance, in the past tense, from tomorrow.

Taste is not one of those. Tasting is the most stubbornly present tense thing a body does. It happens in your mouth, now, and there is no version of it that can be done in advance or caught up on later. You cannot taste Tuesday.

You are being invited into something that can only happen in the present tense, and the verb He chose was deliberately a sensory one. That is not a clever reading of a familiar psalm; Psalm 34:8 says taste and see rather than consider and conclude, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes David's word and lands it in a kitchen at eleven at night with a laptop on a cookbook. The whole invitation is located in the only place you have never been, which is here.

Now the second half, and this is the part I want you to be gentle with yourself about.

The scouting is not a character flaw. Somewhere along the line you learned that being ahead of things was how you kept everybody safe, or how you avoided being caught out, or how you managed a household or a job or a childhood. And you got good at it, and a skill that good does not switch off just because the danger has passed.

But it costs you the present, permanently, because the future is the one room you can always be in and never actually arrive at.

You have been given today and not tomorrow, and He has never once handed anybody more than one day at a time. Matthew 6:34 says take therefore no thought for the morrow, for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes that a relief rather than another instruction to fail at. He is not asking you to stop planning. He is telling you where you live.

What tomorrow does not have

One more observation, and then we will go to the useful part.

Tomorrow has no grace in it yet. This is not poetic, it is a plain feature of how God distributes things in Scripture. The manna came each morning and it would not keep. The mercies are new every morning. The daily bread is asked for daily.

So when forty percent of you is in the meeting at ten, that forty percent is standing somewhere with no supply, because the supply for ten o'clock tomorrow has not been issued yet. That is why the scouting is so exhausting. You have been trying to live in a room He has not furnished.

You are supplied for the hour you are actually in, and the supply for tomorrow arrives with tomorrow rather than before it. Lamentations 3:23 says His mercies are new every morning, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes the timing of that a mercy rather than a technicality. Nothing is missing from tonight. Nothing is stocked in tomorrow.

And here is the last piece, because you have a mouth and it does more than say fine.

Jesus said in Matthew 17:20 that faith the size of a mustard seed, spoken to a mountain, is enough to move it. The smallest seed there is. Not the percentage of you that is currently in the room. That a person opens their mouth and says what God has said. You have that standing because you are in Christ and Christ is in you, and speaking is the appointed way this works. We flip the switch. He sends the current.