The Pie He Did Not Want

Carl has been on the third stool from the register since ten past eight, and it is now a quarter past eleven.

He started with coffee. Then, because a man cannot sit three hours on one cup, he had eggs he did not want at nine, and toast he ate half of, and more coffee. The ticket is under the sugar shaker with two things crossed out on it. The ceiling fan turns slow enough that you can follow one blade all the way around, and he has followed one blade all the way around more times than he would admit.

At a quarter past eleven the waitress comes down the line with the pot and looks at his cup and looks at him, and Carl says, before she can say anything, that he will take a slice of the coconut cream.

He does not want pie. He has not wanted pie since about 2001. What he wants is to keep sitting on a stool in a room where a fan is turning and two men are arguing about a tractor auction in the booth behind him, because the call does not come until Monday, and his house on a Thursday is a very quiet place to be with a Monday in it.

So he orders the pie. It is the reason they leave a man on a stool for three hours, and he knows it, and the waitress brings it with two forks out of habit and takes one back.

He has run Monday about forty times since Tuesday. Both versions of it. The good version has a sentence in it he has written and rewritten, and the other version has a room in it and a chair and what he says when he gets home. He has lived through Monday so many times already that Thursday has begun to feel like a hallway rather than a day.

That is you, maybe, on your own stool, paying your own rent to stay in a room with noise in it, three days early for a conversation that has not happened yet.

What a man is actually ordering

The pie is not about appetite and everybody in the room knows it, including the waitress, who has seen a hundred men order a hundred things they did not want in order to stay somewhere.

What Carl is buying with that pie is company and noise. Two men arguing about a tractor auction is not comfort exactly, but it is proof that the world has other business today besides his, and a man three days out from a phone call needs proof of that more than he needs food.

There is nothing weak in it. I want that said before anything else. Sitting where the noise is, on the day you cannot be alone, is not cowardice and it is not a small faith. It is a man taking care of himself with the tools he has on a Thursday, and God is not embarrassed by it.

But here is what the stool cannot do, and what Carl already knows at eleven fifteen: it cannot get him out of Monday. He has still lived Monday forty times by lunch, and the fan and the tractor auction have not stopped a single run of it.

Which is exactly the thing the Lord addresses, and He addresses it with a strange and practical mercy.

Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.Matthew 6:34

You are inside a day that has been supplied, and you were never issued a ration for Monday to carry around on Thursday. Matthew 6:34 is the text, not my advice, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes a two thousand year old sentence work on a diner stool at a quarter past eleven.

Sufficient unto the day

Notice what He does not say. He does not say the morrow is empty. He says the morrow has its own things, and He says the day has enough in it, and both of those are honest about trouble in a way most encouragement is not.

He is not banning planning. Men plant fields in that book. He is describing a rationing system. Grace comes portioned by the day, like the bread in the wilderness that would not keep overnight, and every man who tried to store it woke to a jar he could not use. Carl has not been given Monday's portion, because it is not Monday, and that is not stinginess. That is how the supply works.

So the forty rehearsals are not sin and they are not failure. They are a man trying to eat Monday's bread on Thursday, and it cannot be done, and the reason he is exhausted at eleven fifteen in the morning is that he has been attempting it since Tuesday.

Now I will say the honest thing, and I will say both halves in the same breath. God heals. He heals bodies, He does it still, He does it through the people caring for you and He does it apart from them. And I do not promise you an outcome, because that is His to decide and it never was mine to hand out, and any page that tells you how Monday goes is handing you something God did not say. I do not know what the call says. Nobody writing to you does.

And this next part is the hinge of the whole page. If Monday is hard, the portion for a hard Monday gets issued on Monday. Not now. Today's ration was never built to cover it, and the fact that it will not stretch that far is not a sign that anything is missing. Keep your appointments. Keep taking what has been given you to take. The God who feeds by the day is not in a contest with the people caring for your body.

You have today, whole and provided, and you were not asked to be strong for a day that has not been handed to you yet. It stands written that the day has enough, and the same Spirit who gave the manna one morning at a time is the one holding today open for you.

And one thing before we go on. If the waiting has taken you somewhere darker than tired, if the thought has come that everyone would have a quieter weekend without you in it, tell one human being today and not tomorrow. In the United States, call or text 988. Anywhere else, your local crisis line, and one person who can come sit with you tonight. Not Monday. Today. A page cannot do that part, and you deserve a person on the stool beside you.