Do not eat the food of a stingy man, do not crave his delicacies; for he is the kind of man who is always thinking about the cost.  "Eat and drink," he says to you, but his heart is not with you.  You will vomit up the little you have eaten and will have wasted your compliments (Proverbs 23:6-8).

When I was in my third year of study at Bowling Green State University, some friends and I went in together to rent an apartment off-campus.  It was our first true experience of "independent living" -- not in our parents' homes, not in pre-packaged University housing, but in our very own apartment.  We had to learn the basics of keeping a house clean, shopping for groceries, paying our bills on-time, working through interpersonal conflicts, and all that kind of stuff.  It ended up being a great year -- and we had a lot of fun together -- but it was also a year in which we learned that we all still had a lot of growing up to do.

Two particular areas of immaturity which I remember from that year were cooking and sharing.  Our eating habits that year were absolutely atrocious.  Boxed macaroni-and-cheese dinners... Ramen noodles... An entire evening meal of Jiffy muffins... Sugary generic cereals and pancakes and Bisquick coffee cakes -- not just for breakfast, but for any meal of any day... It's hilarious, really, to think about it now.  We didn't really care about at the time, however, because we were poor college students with strong young bodies which didn't seem to register the slightest complaint about our dietary habits.  None of us really seemed to mind the fact that we were horrible cooks (as long as everyone washed their own dishes afterwards!).  We did, however, regularly argue with each other about the sharing thing.  Some household supplies were shared by all five of us roommates -- things like sugar and flour and milk, since it would be kind of silly to have five separate containers for each of these staples in our rather-limited cupboard space and refrigerator space; but despite the logic of this arrangement, any kind of "excessive" use of any of these shared supplies would be automatically and immediately condemned by the other roommates.  Another example of sharing difficulties was with our television.  One roommate wanted to subscribe to cable, but the other four felt that plain old "rabbit ear" antennae were good enough (and certainly a lot cheaper).  So in the end, the one roommate decided that he wanted cable television so badly that he would pay for it entirely on his own, but decided out of spite that he would relocate the television set (his TV) into his private room, instead of the living room.  The fact that I still so vividly remember these exchanges probably says as much about our immaturity as anything...

Well -- all of that to set up this story about both cooking and sharing in our college apartment, which has strong overtones of Proverbs 23:6-8 in it... You see, it just so happened that I shared an extra-special sharing relationship with one of the roommates (though I will withhold names for modesty's sake), where we actually bought all of our groceries and shared all of our food together.  For the most part, this actually worked pretty well.  But I remember one afternoon when my roommate was starting to make a coffee cake for supper (yes, a coffee cake for supper).  I noticed that he was doing this but didn't say anything about it, as I was off to class for the last hour of the afternoon, before coming back home for supper.  So later on, as I was heading back home from class, my stomach started growling, and I started thinking about the coffee cake.  I was really looking forward to my half when I got home.  You can probably imagine my disappointment, then, when I got back to the apartment just as my roommate was finishing the last few bites of our coffee cake.  "You pig!" I squealed at him, upon comprehending the situation.  "Now what am I supposed to do about supper?!?!"  Honestly, it didn't even occur to me at the time that my roommate, who had taken on the task of making a coffee cake all on his own might logically be inclined to eat a coffee cake all on his own, too.  I was furious.  We argued back and forth for a couple of minutes, and then I shouted, "I hope you enjoyed it, you big fat pig!" and stormed out of the room.

Some time later, I returned to the kitchen, hoping that my roommate wouldn't be there anymore.  He wasn't.  But to my surprise, there WAS a whole, freshly-baked coffee cake resting on the counter, with a note!  My anger melted.  A healthy bit of shame reddened my cheeks.  I realized that I had acted inappropriately towards my roommate, and I knew at once that I owed him an apology when we next saw each other.  But then I looked down to actually read the note which had been left beside the coffee cake.  It read as follows:

"Happy Birthday, you bitter old man."

The sarcastic note certainly diminished my enjoyment of the coffee cake (though I can't imagine that I would have left it uneaten, given my college student's frugality and appetite).  And the note didn't end up doing much to patch up the immediate relational difficulties (though fortunately, the friendship was relatively easily restored, with time).  However, the whole experience did give us something of a handle for understanding the wisdom of Proverbs 23:6-8.  In the midst of that ridiculous argument over coffee cake, I may have said, "I hope you enjoyed it" -- but that's certainly not what I truly intended.  My roommate may have baked me a coffee cake and wished me happiness (even though it wasn't anywhere near my birthday) -- but that's certainly not what he truly intended.  There may have been a lot of sweet, tasty coffee cake involved in that whole encounter, but the figurative taste left in our mouths was quite sour.

To me, the warnings of Proverbs 23:6-8 will always, automatically, prompt that supplementary text of "Happy Birthday, you bitter old man."  And while I don't have much of an appetite for coffee cake any more -- really, ever since that encounter -- I have learned the sweetness of true generosity.  And I wouldn't trade that for a coffee cake any day.