The Recipe She Never Wrote Down

Twenty three years of Sunday mornings with the small ones, and she has never once used a book.

She does not need one. She knows the stories the way she knows her own kitchen, which is to say she could not tell you where any of it came from, only that it is in there and comes out when it is wanted.

Ask her where she got it and she will tell you about one particular year, and her face changes when she does.

She was young then, with three under five, and no money, and a husband on shifts, and she has said more than once that she does not know how she would have got through that year without the Book. She read it standing up. She read it at four in the morning with a baby on her shoulder. She went at it the way you go at food when you are actually hungry, and everything she took in that year has been coming back out of her ever since, in a room with a paper tablecloth and twenty small children.

Now here is what she noticed a few weeks ago and did not care for at all.

She was telling them about the widow and the oil, which is one of hers, and she heard her own voice doing it, and she thought: I am handing them something I have not tasted in a long time.

Not a crisis. Nobody in that room noticed anything. The class was good. It is always good.

It is that a woman knows when she is passing on the last of a batch, and there is a difference between cooking and reheating, and she has been reheating for a while.

If you know that, come and sit at this table. Nobody is going to hand you a chart for the back of a door.

The tree is not living on the rain from a better year

There is a picture in the very first psalm that I want to slow right down on, because it is usually read as encouragement and it is actually a piece of gardening.

He is like a tree planted by streams of water, that yields its fruit in its season, and its leaf does not wither.Psalm 1:3

Look at what does the work. Not effort. Not stored rain. Planted by streams. The tree is in a place where water goes past, continuously, and everything else in the verse follows from where it is standing rather than from what it is doing.

That is why a tree by a river is green in a summer that kills the beans.

You have been thinking of what you carry as a batch you made once in a hard year. It is not a batch. That is why it has felt like running out.

You are not living off a reserve, and you were never meant to. Psalm 1:3 puts the tree beside moving water rather than beside a tank, and it is the Holy Spirit whom Jesus called a spring of water welling up to eternal life, so the supply you are worried about is a current and it has not stopped.

Nothing about that year was wasted, and nothing about your age here is a lid

Now let me deal with the two things a woman in her position usually does to herself, because both are wrong and both are common.

The first is to decide she is a fraud. She is not. What you took in during that year was real, it fed twenty three years of small children, and the fact that it lasted that long says something admirable about how deeply it went in at the time. Nobody is calling those years shallow and nobody is calling them wasted.

The second is to go and get a system. A plan, a scheme with a name, a chart on the back of a door. This site does not hand anybody one of those and I am not about to start.

You have not reached a ceiling, and there is no age in this at which the feeding stops. Colossians 2:7 speaks of being rooted and built up in Him, and both of those are ongoing rather than finished, and it is the Spirit who does the building, which means twenty three years is not a lid on anything.

Here is the entire offer, and it is smaller than you are braced for. Not more reading. Slower reading.

In that hard year you read like somebody eating. Which means you went slowly, and stopped, and said things out loud, and read a line twice because it had hit something. Somewhere since then you started reading the way a woman checks a page she already knows, and that is the whole difference, and it is not about how much time you have.

You are still growing, and you are being fed right now, as you read. Isaiah 55:2 asks why anybody spends money on what is not bread, and it is the Holy Spirit who takes lines you have handled a thousand times and makes them food again, which is the one thing no amount of trying could have produced.

And under it all, the ground this site stands on: God is the one keeping you while you keep what you were given. The root is not your achievement. It is where He planted you.