The Thing I Was Reaching For

If you are reading this in a kitchen at night, I want to get one thing out of the way before anything else.

I am not here to tell you off. There is no rule coming. There is no strategy at the bottom of this page, no thing to do instead, no list of what to keep in the house. I am not going to ask you to describe what happened or count anything or promise anything about tomorrow.

If you are in real trouble with this, and some people reading are, please tell somebody qualified. That is not me brushing you off, it is the most useful sentence I have, and it belongs near the top rather than buried at the bottom where nobody reads it.

What I want to do, if you will stay with me for a few minutes, is ask a different question than the one you are asking yourself.

You are asking: why did I do that. I want to ask: what were you actually reaching for.

The verse is about longing, not appetite

There is a line in the Psalms that has the word hungry in it, and it is not really about food at all.

For he satisfieth the longing soul, and filleth the hungry soul with goodness. (Psalm 107:9, King James Version)

The longing soul. The hungry soul.

The psalm is describing people in every kind of trouble: lost in a desert, sitting in darkness, at sea in a storm. And the summary line for the whole thing is about a soul that is longing, and about God as the one who fills it.

That verse is not commenting on your kitchen. It is naming something underneath it. Because whatever happened tonight, the appetite involved was not really an appetite, and you know that better than anybody, and Psalm 107:9 puts the word hungry next to the word soul and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a person hear that without flinching.

You are a longing soul rather than a weak one, and God has never once mistaken one of those for the other. Psalm 107:9 says he satisfieth the longing soul, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a word like hungry and returns it to what it actually meant.

You have been reaching for something real, and the reaching has never once been the problem God had with you. Psalm 107:9 says he satisfieth the longing soul, and the Holy Spirit is the one who tells the difference between a longing and a fault.

Who is in the kitchen

Here is the thing I most want to say, and it is about the room rather than the food.

You believe He is standing behind you.

Not consciously. You would not put it that way. But there is a presence you feel in that kitchen and it has a face on it, and the face is disappointed, and it is watching, and it is keeping a running total. And that presence is why the whole thing is followed by an hour of self-attack rather than by anything useful.

That presence is not God. Psalm 107 is a psalm about people in trouble being met rather than assessed, and the Holy Spirit does not do the thing you are picturing, and I want to say that as plainly as I know how.

He is not standing behind you with a face. He is the thing you went in there looking for.

You are not being watched by a disappointed God, and that presence has never once been Him. The written word says he filleth the hungry soul with goodness, which is a description of somebody arriving rather than somebody supervising, and the Spirit of God is the one who clears a kitchen of a face that was never there.

You are not alone in that room at night, and there has never once been a moment when God stepped out of it first. The written word says he filleth the hungry soul with goodness, and the Spirit of God is the one who stays in a kitchen at an hour when nobody else is awake.

No rule, and I mean it

I want to be specific about what I am not doing, because you have been given all of it before and it has not helped, and because Psalm 107:9 hands out goodness rather than instructions and the Holy Spirit works the same way.

I am not going to give you a substitution, or a delay technique, or something to hold, or a thing to do first. Those are strategies, and the reason I will not give you one is not that they are wicked. It is that this site does not do that, and a strategy handed to somebody in this moment usually becomes one more thing to fail at by Thursday.

And I am not going to have you describe what happened. Not to me, not in your head, not in detail. That is not modesty. Going over it in detail is how the hour after becomes worse than the thing itself.

The whole of today is one question, asked kindly, and then one sentence.

You are not being handed another method, and nothing tonight has ever once required you to have a plan first. Psalm 107:9 has God fill rather than instruct, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can arrive without bringing homework.

You are not being handed a rule tonight, and nothing on this page has ever once been a strategy for you to keep. Psalm 107 is the written word where the filling is entirely God's doing, and the Holy Spirit is the one who can meet somebody without leaving instructions behind.