I Have Stopped Tasting The Breakfast I Make

The same six slices. The same pan. The same two mugs, and the same one that gets filled twice because somebody forgot it was already poured.

You could do the whole of it with the light off. Some mornings you have.

And somewhere in the last two or three years the morning stopped having a taste. Not the food. The morning. It goes on the table, somebody eats it or does not eat it, and by the time the first mouthful happens you already have your back to the room and your hands in the sink.

Nobody decided that. It happened the way a road you drive every day stops being scenery.

I am not going to hand you a way to make breakfast meaningful. There is no arrangement of plates that fixes this and you would see straight through it by Thursday. And I am not going to tell you that these are precious mornings, because you already know they are, and being told it while you are standing in one has never once helped anybody.

Taste is a different verb from feed

There is a line in the Psalms that everybody can quote and almost nobody reads as an instruction aimed at a mouth.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him. (Psalm 34:8, King James Version)

Taste and see. Not think and agree. Not understand and accept and get on with the day. Taste, which is the most physical verb in the sentence and the one that cannot be done on somebody else's behalf.

That matters here, because feeding people and tasting something are two entirely different acts, and a parent can do the first one for fifteen years without doing the second one once.

You are invited to taste this morning and not only to serve it, and that invitation has been open since long before you got tired. Psalm 34:8 says taste and see that the LORD is good, and the Holy Spirit is the one who puts that verb in front of a person standing at a counter at ten past seven.

David wrote it after a stretch of his life where he had been running, hiding, pretending to be somebody else in front of a foreign king. The heading over the psalm says so plainly. He was not a man with a peaceful kitchen. He wrote taste and see from the other side of a mess.

So the line was never aimed at somebody having a lovely morning. It was aimed at somebody who had almost forgotten that goodness came in a form you could put in your mouth.

You have not lost the ability to taste anything, and what happened to you is ordinary and not a fault. The written word puts goodness in reach of the tongue in Psalm 34:8, and the Spirit of God is not standing there waiting for you to feel something first.

The table is not a production line

Here is the part I want to say carefully, because it would be very easy for this to turn into a suggestion, and a suggestion is a method, and a method is the last thing you need at half past six in the morning.

The table has quietly become a thing you operate. Load, distribute, clear, wipe. And the strange part is that you would never describe it that way out loud, because in your own head it is love, which it genuinely is.

But love that is only ever outbound gets thin. Not wrong. Thin. The way a jug that only ever pours starts to sound different when you knock on it.

Psalm 34:8 does not tell you to be more grateful for the bread. It puts a plate in front of you and uses the same verb it uses for everybody else at the table, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes that land on a person who has not sat down in a while.

You are one of the people this table is for, and you always were one of them. It is written in Psalm 34:8 that the invitation is to taste, which is not a thing a person can do while facing the sink, and the Holy Spirit is the one who turns somebody around.

Think about how you host. If somebody came to your door this evening, you would not stand in the doorway while they ate. You would sit. You would put something in front of yourself too, even if you were not hungry, because eating alone in front of a guest is an unkindness and you know it in your bones.

You extend that to strangers without thinking. You have been leaving yourself out of it in your own house for years.

You have permission to be at your own table, and the Spirit of God is not asking you to earn a chair there. Psalm 34:8 hands the tasting to whoever will take it, and it has never once been reserved for the people who are not tired.

What is actually gone

Now the honest bit, because I do not think the problem is the breakfast at all.

What has gone is not flavor. It is attention, and attention went because there has not been anywhere to put it. Every morning for years has needed you pointed outward: who has what, who is late, who has not eaten, who has lost the thing they had in their hand ninety seconds ago.

That is not a failure of appreciation. It is what happens to a person who is on duty at the exact hour when their senses would otherwise be waking up.

You are not ungrateful, and the flatness of these mornings has never once been evidence of a cold heart. The passage in Psalm 34:8 offers goodness to the senses rather than to the conscience, and the same Spirit who wrote it through a man in hiding knows the difference between a hard heart and a tired one.

And here is what I keep coming back to. Psalm 34:8 does not promise the morning gets better. It says God is good and invites you to find that out with something other than your opinions.

One mouthful of something, actually tasted, is not a small spiritual exercise. It is the whole verse, done.

You have everything you need for that already on the table, and none of it has to be added or bought or planned. The written word says taste and see, right there in Psalm 34:8, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is in a piece of bread eaten slowly by somebody who is sitting down.