The Cook Who Stopped Tasting

Eleven o'clock in a works canteen kitchen and the extractor is going, so everybody talks slightly louder than they need to. Sylvia has the big pans on. Denise is doing the trays. There is a lad on his second week who has been given the potatoes because the potatoes are hard to ruin.

Sylvia has run this kitchen for fifteen years. She can do the whole service without thinking about it. She knows the timings to the minute, she knows which oven runs hot, she knows that if she starts the gravy when the vans come in it will be right when the hatch goes up. Nobody has ever complained about her food. There are men on that shift who would eat her cottage pie four days a week and say so.

The lad, who does not know any better, dips a teaspoon in and tastes it and pulls a small face and reaches for the pepper.

Sylvia is about to say something and does not.

Because she has just noticed, standing there with a cloth over her shoulder, that she cannot remember the last time she tasted anything she made. Not once this year. She cooks by the clock and by her hands and by fifteen years of knowing. She has been making it right for so long that she stopped checking whether it was right, and the truth is that somewhere along the way the seasoning drifted, slowly, the way a thing drifts when nobody is tasting it, and it is still good and it is not what it was, and the only person in the building who would ever have known is her.

She stands there with the extractor roaring and thinks about something else entirely, which is that she has not sat down with God in a long time either. Not stopped. Never stopped. She prays, she turns up, she does the whole service from memory.

You are reading this because you know what she has just worked out. Nothing has collapsed. You have not walked away from anything, and if anybody asked, everything would sound right, and it would be right. You are simply running on what you were given a long time ago, and you know it, and you have known it for a while, and there has not been a good moment to say so out loud.

Nobody is telling you to try harder

Let me start by taking something off the table, because the bracing started somewhere around the second paragraph.

This is not the part where you get handed a scheme. There is no plan coming, no chart, no six weeks of anything, no suggestion that slackness is the trouble and that applying yourself is the answer. If a scheme were what you needed you would have solved this fifteen years ago, because a person who can run a kitchen like that is not a person short of discipline.

What has gone missing is not effort. It is tasting.

Hear this where you stand with the cloth over your shoulder. You are not too far in to be fed, and God has not moved you on to the staff side of the hatch. Scripture keeps the invitation in the present tense for people who have known Him for decades, and it is the Holy Spirit who makes an old line taste of something instead of reading like a caption.

Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good! Blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.Psalm 34:8

Look at what David asks for there. Not study. Not resolve. Taste. It is the most immediate verb in the Psalms, and you cannot do it at a distance, and you cannot do it on somebody else's behalf, and you certainly cannot do it from memory. A man who has eaten a thing a thousand times still has to put it in his mouth today if he wants to know what it is like today.

And notice who it is said to. Not to beginners. It comes in a psalm of a man well down the road with God, with a great deal behind him, and he is not telling anybody to go back to the start. He is telling people who already know that the good is still there to be tasted, this morning, in the ordinary way.

Here is the thing about drift that nobody says kindly enough, so I will say it kindly. Nothing about the last fifteen years was wasted. What you learned then was real, it is what has held you up since, and a good deal of what is best about you was built in that season. The seasoning did not drift because you were careless. Psalm 92:14 says they still bear fruit in old age and stay full of sap and green, which is His Spirit doing something in a person rather than a report on their effort. It drifted because you were feeding everybody else and the hatch went up at twelve every day regardless.

So take this, while the pans are still on. You have been kept the whole way through, by God and not by your own vigilance, and there is nothing in your years that has put you past the age of being fed. What is written says His mercies are new in the morning, and the Spirit of God is not rationing Himself to people in their first decade.

I have spent my life among old books, and the trade has a word for what happens to a page nobody opens: nothing dramatic, nothing anybody could photograph. It simply goes stiff. A book that is read stays supple, because the hands and the air and the turning keep it moving, and a book that is only kept goes hard along the spine until in the end it will not lie open at all. Keeping is necessary. Keeping alone is not enough, and it was never meant to be, because the thing was made to be opened.

That is you and the passage you could recite. You are not being sent back to school. You are being invited to taste something you have been serving out for years, and Scripture never sends a long serving person back to the beginning, and the Holy Spirit is the one putting the taste of it back in your mouth.