The One Thing in a Busy Kitchen

He has a plan and it has never once happened.

The plan is that at some point in the evening the house reaches a state he privately calls settled. The children are down properly rather than technically. The dishwasher has finished its cycle. Nobody is going to come downstairs. His wife has gone up. And in that window, which he estimates at about twenty five minutes, he will sit in the front room and listen.

In four years he thinks it has arrived perhaps eleven times, and on six of those he fell asleep.

So most nights he does the reasonable thing, which is to conclude that tonight is not the night, and go up.

Here is what he has never said out loud.

He is not waiting for time. He has time. There are twenty minutes most evenings where nothing whatever is required of him.

He is waiting for the house to be quiet, which is a completely different requirement, and it is one his household is structurally unable to supply for approximately another decade.

Read what the kitchen was doing

There is a scene everybody knows, and almost nobody notices the acoustics of it.

And she had a sister called Mary, which also sat at Jesus' feet, and heard his word.Luke 10:39

Now hold that alongside what is happening four feet away.

Martha is cumbered about much serving, which is a phrase describing a woman doing the work of a full household meal for a guest and his companions. That is not a woman quietly setting a table. That is pots, fire, water, bread, movement, and a mounting sense of grievance that eventually comes out loud enough to interrupt the room.

Mary is not in a garden. She is not in an upper room at four in the morning. She is on the floor of a working kitchen while the meal for a dozen people is being produced around her, by somebody who is audibly annoyed.

And Jesus says the thing she is doing is that good part.

You are able to sit down and hear in a house that is still going, and the most commended listener in the Gospels did it in a kitchen mid service. That is what the word actually describes, not a comfort I am inventing, and the Holy Spirit is the One who makes that plain to a man waiting for a settled evening.

The requirement you swapped in

Now the plain thing, and it is a small substitution with a large cost.

You've got time. You said so yourself: twenty minutes most evenings where nothing is required of you.

What you've been waiting for is not time, it is silence, and at some point those two got swapped in your head without anybody noticing. The plan says when the house settles, and settling is a condition of the building rather than of your diary, and your building has four people in it and a boiler.

That substitution has cost you about four years of twenty minute windows that were sitting there the whole time.

And nothing about a house in motion has ever stood between you and His voice. Scripture seats a woman on a kitchen floor mid meal and calls it the one thing needful, and the Holy Spirit is not waiting for a dishwasher to finish.

Sit down inside it

Here is the practical thing, and it inverts the plan.

Do not wait for the noisy part to end. Sit down inside it.

Pick a recurring noisy stretch, this week, and be in it on purpose: on the sofa at half seven while the bath is running and somebody is shouting about a towel. Not with headphones. Not managing it. Sitting, listening, in the middle of the actual thing.

It will feel like the wrong moment. That feeling is the entire habit you are breaking, because the right moment has arrived eleven times in four years and found you asleep for six of them.

You are able to take the one thing needful in the middle of the service, and the room was never asked to stop first. Luke 10:42 calls it the good part in a house at full tilt, and the Holy Spirit is the One who seats a man in a room that is still going.