Dear Friends,
I’m posting the first 5 chapters of my new book over 5 weeks. This is Chapter 3, the chapter that gave the book its title. If you’ve missed the earlier chapters, they’re all at theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time, along with the other 23 you haven’t seen yet. You’re welcome to read it all at that link anytime.
Here’s Chapter 3…
Chapter 3: One Slice at a Time
“The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day” (Exodus 16:4b).
After my wife left, I sat down at my desk and made a list of everything that had to happen.
I had to tell the five hundred people who had been invited to a celebration that it was no longer going to take place. I had to cancel the events. I had to get papers drawn up and figure out how to get them signed by someone in another state who I had no idea if she’d sign them. I had to decide what to say to thousands of email subscribers who had read all about how God had brought us together. I had to figure out what to do about the health insurance we’d combined. I had to answer my six kids.
And underneath all of that, I had a desk with six separate piles of projects I’d set down when I met her and hadn’t picked up since. A movie script. A puppet opera video I’d stopped editing at Christmas. Brochures I’d had printed to raise a hundred thousand dollars, sitting in a box, unfolded.
I looked at that list and had one thought. It was not a godly one.
I want to be done.
Not done with the marriage — that decision had already been made. Done with the aftermath. I wanted a date on the calendar when all of it would be finished and I could go back to being a person with a normal Tuesday.
So I started trying to do all of it at once. I’d draft the note to the five hundred people, get three sentences in, remember the insurance, go look at the insurance, get overwhelmed, open the movie script instead, and accomplish exactly nothing in four hours. Then I’d go to bed feeling like a man who’d wasted a day he couldn’t afford to waste.
When I described this to Sharon, she said, “You’re trying to do it all at once, and you can’t.”
Then she told me not to make a single announcement until Monday. That was on a Wednesday. She just handed four days back to me on my calendar.
I felt about a hundred pounds lighter.
The Pie
A few weeks later she gave me the picture that went with it.
She said she uses the old pie thing with people. Don’t try to eat the whole pie at once. Cut it up, take a slice, and deal with that. If you eat the whole thing, it’s going to make you sick. She said she’s watched people take a quarter of a pie in one sitting and then wonder why their stomach hurts.
I wrote it down even though I thought it sounded like something on a magnet.
I’ve been going to Celebrate Recovery long enough to have heard one day at a time several hundred times. I believe it. I’ve said it to other people. But by that point in my life I’d stopped hearing it, the way you stop hearing a clock in your own kitchen.
Then she told me the rest of it, and the rest of it is what made it true.
What Her Granddaughter Told Her
Sharon has a granddaughter who thinks math is fun. Sharon does not. She says she and math parted ways a long time ago.
But she’d been explaining the pie idea to this granddaughter one day, and asked her how something so simple could possibly help a person get organized. So the granddaughter sat down and did the actual mathematics of it, dividing up a pie eight ways.
And then she said the thing that changed it for Sharon.
Grandma — every time you slice into that pie, some of the other slices run into it. The filling moves. The juice from the pieces on either side runs into the cut. So even when you take one slice, you have to recognize it’s been sitting against the whole thing, and it’s bringing some of the rest with it.
And it’s still not more than you can handle.
That’s the part that isn’t on a magnet.
I had been trying to take things one at a time. That’s what people were telling me to do. But every time I sat down to handle one thing, the whole thing came with it.
I’d sit down to write the note to those five hundred people, and within four sentences I’d be thinking about what she was posting online, and then about whether I’d been a fool from the first week, and then about the money, and then about whether God had ever actually spoken to me at all. One task. Six other flavors bleeding into it.
And I read that as failure. I thought it meant I couldn’t do it right, that other people could compartmentalize and I couldn’t, that something in me was broken.
The correction is that the juice running in is normal. It’s what happens when you cut into a pie. It doesn’t mean the piece was too big. It means the pieces were touching, which they always are.
I had been trying to take a slice with nothing else on it. There’s no such slice.
God Deliberately Built a System You Can’t Stockpile
When the Israelites came out of Egypt into the desert with no food, God fed them with manna, and He was very particular about how.
“The people are to go out each day and gather enough for that day” (Exodus 16:4b).
Enough for that day. Not for the week. And when some of them tried to store extra overnight, it bred worms and began to stink.
That detail matters when you’re sitting in your own kitchen with a list you can’t finish. God was not being stingy. He had every ability to drop a year’s supply in the desert. He chose a system that could not be stockpiled.
There’s only one thing a system like that produces: a person who has to come back tomorrow.
And there’s a second detail in the story. On the sixth day they gathered twice as much, and it kept — no worms, no smell — because the seventh day was a Sabbath. So the rule wasn’t rigid. God adjusted the portion to the day. Some days the slice is bigger. Some days the assignment is to stop.
Jesus said a similar thing near the end of the Sermon on the Mount:
“Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own” (Matthew 6:34).
Each day has enough. Not too much. Enough.
What One Slice Actually Looked Like
For me it came down to three habits, and none of them are complicated.
I decided what the slice was before the day started. Not a list. One thing. Some days it was “write the note.” Some days it was “call the insurance company.” Some days it was “fold brochures,” which sounds like nothing, but it was a thing that got finished, and a thing that got finished was like medicine.
I let the juice run in without treating it as evidence. When the other flavors showed up — and they did show up — I stopped concluding that I was doing it wrong.
I put a timer on how much I’d talk about it. Sharon told me to decide in advance how long I’d discuss the divorce with any one friend, and then move on to something else. I actually set my phone. Twelve minutes.
That last one sounds juvenile. I said so at the time. She said it wasn’t, and she was right, because there’s a way to choke on your own subject.
She has a new Labrador who will take anything out of her hand and swallow it whole, and then she has to reach down his throat and pull it back out, because he has no idea how to eat a little bit of something. I did that to myself for months. I’d sit down with a friend who’d asked how I was doing and take the whole thing in one bite, three hours of it, and stand up afterwards wrung out and not always better.
The subject isn’t the problem. The portion is.
Different Than One Day at a Time
I told Sharon that I knew about one day at a time, but one slice at a time gave me something new.
One day at a time is about the clock, and the clock is not actually my problem. I can get through a day. What I couldn’t do was get through everything in a day, and no amount of “one day at a time” told me how much to put on the plate.
A slice is about size. It’s the amount, not the hour. Some days I got through three slices and felt like a man again. Some days one slice was the whole day’s work, and one slice was enough, because there is no rule that says a Tuesday has to hold more than one true thing.
And there’s one more thing I like about the pie analogy. Pie is not a punishment. I don’t eat pie grimly. When I take a slice of something good, I can actually taste it. When I take the whole pan, I hardly taste any of it and I feel awful afterwards.
I had been trying to swallow the entire thing whole and not tasting one bite of it.
The pile in chapter two was real. I was carrying six things when the seventh came. But the answer to a pile that size was never going to be to lift the whole pile.
It was to cut it.
Will you pray with me?
Father, thank You that we don’t need more than one day at a time, even in the desert, even when we begged You for the whole year’s worth. Thank You that You built us to need You again tomorrow. Lord, we confess that we want to be done — done with the grief, done with the aftermath, done with the part where everything is hard. Would You show us the one slice that belongs to today? Give us the grace to leave the rest on the counter without calling ourselves failures for it. And when the other flavors run into the piece we’re working on, remind us that this is how pie works, and that it’s still not more than we can handle with Your help. In Jesus’ name, Amen.
Questions for Reflection
1. Read Exodus 16:1-30. Why do you think God chose to provide food that couldn’t be stored up? What was He producing in the people besides full stomachs?
2. In verses 22-26, the rule changes for the sixth day. What does that suggest about how God adjusts what He gives us?
3. Read Matthew 6:25-34. Jesus says each day has enough trouble of its own. What are you currently carrying that belongs to a day that hasn’t arrived yet?
4. If you could only finish one thing tomorrow, what would it be? Try writing it down tonight, before the day starts and decides for you.
Next week: Chapter 4, “Learning to Go to Neutral.” It begins on a Monday night when I walked out of a meeting, drove to Walmart and cried in the bathroom.
The whole book is free to read or listen to online at theranch.org/one-slice-at-a-time, and the paperback, Kindle, Audible and Google Play editions are on the same page.
Thank you for being here. It means more than I can say.
Love,
Eric Elder writes for page, stage & screen to glorify God’s name so Christ may be seen! Hit reply to send Eric a note! Use this link to subscribe or unsubscribe.