The Kitchen Is Not Closed

He cooks one plate now.

One plate, one pan, and it is a perfectly decent plate. He is not living on toast and he would be offended if you thought so. He seasons it. He sits down to it. It takes eleven minutes and then it is done and the pan is washed and the evening carries on.

And this is the man who used to cook for twenty three people on the second Sunday of every month, for years, in a kitchen where the door did not shut properly because there was always somebody coming through it.

If you ask him what changed, he will say something entirely reasonable. He will say that people are busy now. He will say the family is spread out. He will say, and this is the sentence he uses most, that he is being realistic.

Realistic is a word that does an enormous amount of quiet work in a life.

Because here is what actually happened, and he has never quite put it this way. After everything, he stopped. Not with a decision, not with an announcement. There was a month where he did not do it, and there was a reason for that month, and the reason was good. And then there was another one. And then it had been long enough that starting again would have been a statement, and he was not going to make a statement, so it simply never came back.

He retired himself, and he handed in no notice, and nobody accepted it, because nobody was ever told.

I want to say something about the reasonableness of it, because I am not going to stand here and call a grieving man lazy. Every reason he gives is true. People are busy. The family is spread out. And there is a tiredness in him that is not laziness at all, and anybody who has been through what he has been through knows exactly what that tiredness is made of.

But watch what the word realistic is doing. It is dressing a conclusion as an observation. The observation is that fewer people come. The conclusion is that he is finished, and the conclusion arrived wearing the clothes of the observation, and he has not looked at it since.

I am not going to ask you what happened. Not a word of it. This is about the pan, and God already knows the rest.

An old man asks for something, and it is not comfort

Psalm 71 is written by somebody old, and it is honest about being old. There is fear in it. There is a real dread of being set aside.

And then he asks for something, and what he asks for is the interesting part.

Now also when I am old and grayheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have showed thy strength unto this generation, and thy power to every one that is to come.Psalm 71:18

Listen to the request. He does not ask for rest. He does not ask for ease, or for a peaceful end, or to be spared anything.

He asks not to be finished before he has done a specific thing: shown this generation, and the next one, what God is like.

That is a working man's prayer. It is a request for more time on the job, made by somebody entirely aware that the strong years are gone.

Here is what that puts on the table in front of you. You are not finished, and Psalm 71:18 has an old man asking for the work rather than for the rest, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that prayer in a person who has quietly closed his own kitchen.

Now notice what the psalm does not say, because I will not oversell it to you.

He does not ask for twenty three people. He does not ask for the second Sunday of the month, or for the crowd, or for the years back. Showing this generation what God is like does not have a minimum headcount attached to it anywhere in that verse.

That matters enormously here, because your retirement was justified by arithmetic. Fewer people, so what is the point. But the verse does not do arithmetic. One neighbor at a table is a generation being shown something. Two grandchildren and a pan is a generation being shown something.

You have work that has never once depended on the number who came, and Psalm 71:18 sets the aim at showing rather than at filling a room, and the Holy Spirit is not measuring your usefulness against your best year.

And then there is the other half of the verse, the part people skip because it sounds like a formality. Forsake me not.

He is afraid. That is in the text. An old man is genuinely afraid of being set aside, and he says so to God, and God kept the sentence in the psalm. Nothing in Psalm 71 requires you to pretend you are not tired, or not afraid, or not sad about the door that used to not shut properly, and the Holy Spirit has never asked a tired man to perform anything before He gives him work.