Nine Days of the Same Thing

Nine days. She knows it is nine because she has been counting, and the counting is not helping.

Pasta, and a tin, and whatever is in the cupboard that will go with it. Sometimes a bit of cheese at the end of the week and then no cheese. She has got quite good at it, which is its own particular sort of joke.

Her daughter is six and has said, twice, in the utterly artless way a six year old says things, is it this again.

And she has said what she says, which is that it is a favorite, isn't it, and made a small thing of the stirring, and put it down on the table with a flourish, and eaten less than half of hers so there is enough for the lunchbox.

She has been cheerful about it for nine days.

That is what is finishing her. Not the food. The performance. Standing over a pan at half past five doing a voice, with the calculation running underneath about Thursday, when the money that is not enough arrives and immediately is not enough.

She has not told anybody. Her mother would help, instantly, and that is exactly why she has not told her mother. There is a place that gives out food about a mile away and she has walked past it four times and not gone in and could not tell you precisely why except that going in would make it a fact.

That is you, and the cheerfulness is costing you more than the pasta.

What this page will never do

I want to be blunt, because this is the category where people get hurt.

Nothing here will ask you for money. Nothing here is behind anything. There is no giving that unlocks anything on this site and there never will be, and if you have met that somewhere else, it was not from God and it was not the gospel. It is written, in Matthew 6:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

Nothing here will tell you that your finances reflect your faith. That teaching has done enormous damage to people in exactly your position, and it is not what the Bible says, and Paul wrote about knowing how to be abased while he was the one abased.

And nothing here is a substitute for practical help. If a food bank or a hardship fund or a benefits check is available to you, that is God's provision arriving in the ordinary way, and it does not become less holy for having a queue.

You are not in this because your faith fell short. Scripture says I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound, Philippians 4:12, and Paul is writing that from inside the lean half rather than looking back at it, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps a person steady in a week that does not add up.

The line in the prayer that is smaller than people think

There is a request in the middle of the most famous prayer there is, and almost everybody reads past the size of it.

Give us this day our daily bread.Matthew 6:11

Bread. Not enough for a comfortable year. Not the removal of the difficulty. Bread, which is the least glamorous item on any table and the one you notice only when it is not there.

This day. Not a month's security. Today's.

He taught people to ask for this. That is the part I want you to have. The King of everything, teaching people how to pray, put food at the front of the list and made it a daily request, which means asking for it is not small faith or unspiritual or grabby. It is the model.

You have been treating your need as though it were beneath prayer, something to be handled quietly and then brought to God when it was solved. He put it in the prayer Himself.

You are not asking for something beneath Him. Scripture says give us this day our daily bread, Matthew 6:11, and He is the one who put that request in the mouths of everybody who prays, and the Holy Spirit is not embarrassed by a prayer about a Thursday.

The performance is the expensive part

Nine days of pasta is genuinely hard and I am not going to be light about it.

But the thing that has taken the most out of you is the voice you do at half past five.

You are carrying the lack, and on top of the lack you are carrying the concealment of the lack, and the concealment is the heavier of the two because it never gets to stop. A person can be tired. A person cannot be tired and be doing a performance about not being tired. Scripture settles that in Matthew 6:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

And here is the part worth hearing. Your daughter is six. She is not frightened by a repeated meal. What children read is not the menu, it is the atmosphere, and a mother doing a bright voice with something rigid underneath it is more legible to a six year old than you think.

You are allowed to say, lightly and without a speech: money is tight at the minute, so it is this again, and it will not always be. That is not a burden to put on a child. It is the truth, in a size she can hold, from somebody calm.

You are not required to perform. Scripture says casting all your care upon him; for he careth for you, 1 Peter 5:7, and casting is a throwing word rather than a managing word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who lets a woman put down the voice she has been doing at half past five.

The door you have walked past four times

Four times. And you could not say why.

I think you could. Going in makes it a fact, and a fact has a name, and the name is the one you have been holding off for nine days. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Matthew 6:11, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

So let me take the name off it. A food bank is not a verdict on your parenting or your work or your worth. It is a room where people who have more than they need this week give it to people who have less than they need this week, which is the plainest description of the early church that exists.

And the people in that room are you in a different month. That is genuinely how it works: the same people who queue are the ones who bring things later, and nobody in there is keeping a list.

If it is a referral you need, a GP surgery or a school or a council office can make one and they do it constantly.

You are not the only one who has ever needed this. Scripture says bear ye one another's burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ, Galatians 6:2, and it takes two people to fulfill that law and one of them has to be willing to be the one carried, and the Holy Spirit is at work in the person who fills that bag as much as in the one who takes it.