The Man Who Starts the Prep

The back door of a restaurant at seven in the morning smells of last night and bleach, and he is the one who opens it.

He is always first. Lights, extraction, burners, and then the crates in off the step while the kitchen is still cold. Onions, and a lot of them. By the time the chefs arrive at nine there is order where there was none, and nobody will mention it, and he does not expect anybody to.

He is thirty-one. He goes home to his mother's flat and he is gentle there, and he prays with her on Sunday nights in Spanish, which is the only time all week he prays out loud.

And this is the thing that has started to sit on him.

In that kitchen he is somebody harder. Faster, sharper, louder, quicker to swear when a delivery is short. Not a bad man. Just a different one, with a different face on, and he has watched himself put that face on at the back door, every morning, the way other men put on an apron.

Last week his mother asked him about work, and he heard himself describing somebody he did not entirely recognize, and afterwards he sat in the dark on the balcony and thought: which of them does God have?

That is your back door. That is your seven o'clock. And I want to reach you before the burners go on, because that question has a much better answer than the one you have been fearing.

Christ does not attend in shifts

Paul writes a sentence about identity that is so strong it takes a while to hear properly, and he writes it as a man whose own life had two very different halves.

I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by the faith of the Son of God.Galatians 2:20

Look where he puts Christ. Not beside him. Not waiting at the house. In me, and then, in case anybody thinks that means somewhere spiritual and elsewhere, he adds the life which I now live in the flesh, which is the ordinary, physical, working life, the one with hands in it.

You have Christ in you at that back door. Not met again on Sunday night in the front room with your mother. In you, at seven, in the cold, with the crates on the step. The written word puts Him inside the man rather than beside the man, and the Holy Spirit makes that a live fact in a kitchen rather than a doctrine you remember on a good day.

Now, let me be careful and honest with you, because there are two different things tangled together and only one of them is a real problem.

Being faster and sharper in a kitchen is not a second self. It is a working register, and every trade has one. Your mother has one too, and you have simply never seen her use it. A man is not divided because he is brisk at a hot pass and gentle at a small table.

But you named something else on that balcony, and it is worth naming plainly. It was not the speed. It was the swearing at a short delivery, and the way it comes up out of you before you have decided anything.

You are not two men, and you do not have to be. The written word says Christ lives in you, and lives is a present continuous thing, not a visit. The Holy Spirit is in the kitchen at the moment the delivery is short, and He is not shocked by it and He has not stepped outside to wait.

Here is what that means for a Monday, and it is a relief rather than a demand.

You do not have to reform yourself into a quieter man before God will occupy the working hours. He already occupies them. You are not smuggling Him in past the back door and hoping the kitchen does not notice. He came in with you and He has been prepping alongside you every morning of this job.

You have one life and He is in the whole of it. The life which I now live in the flesh takes in onions and extraction fans and a bad delivery on a Monday. The Holy Spirit does not divide your week into the parts He is fond of and the parts He tolerates.