I Wanted To Be The One Teaching

Eleven forty on a Sunday and the kitchen is at the point in a lunch where everything is either going to work or it is not, and he already knows it is going to work.

Four of them in there. Steam on the window over the sink. A woman calling something through the hatch that gets a laugh out in the hall. Two hundred and eleven people out there, which is the number he counted at the door and which he keeps in his head all morning like a man keeping track of a tide.

Twenty-six years he has cooked for that church.

Every big occasion. Every funeral. The Christmas thing that grew from forty people to two hundred and did not break, and did not break specifically because he thought about it in September.

He is loved. That is not sentimental, it is just observably true. Somebody's grandmother sends him things.

And in the shelf beside his bed there are about ninety books.

Commentaries mostly. Two on Romans he has read three times each. A Greek reference he cannot use properly and uses anyway. He reads for an hour most nights and has done for twenty-five years, and there are three or four things he has come to understand that he has never heard anybody say from the front, and he has thought about how he would say them, at some length, over a great many years.

Nobody has ever asked him.

And he has never asked, because asking would be a request to be given a thing, and there is something in a man of his generation that cannot do that, and because the man who does teach is good and does not need a sixty year old cook offering opinions.

What will not happen here

Let me say it plainly at the start, out of respect.

This page is not going to tell you what you have instead. There is nothing arriving at the bottom that names your real gift and expects you to be satisfied. That would be a page telling a man what he is, and this site does not do it.

And it is not going to tell you that cooking is secretly the deeper ministry. That is a compliment given in place of an answer and you have heard it before and it did not help.

And it is not going to tell you the invitation is coming. Nobody knows that.

You are not being handled here, and there is no exchange being offered. That is not caution on my part. Scripture handles this in a psalm about how a person was made, and the Holy Spirit has never once needed a man satisfied with a substitute before He would speak to him.

Fearfully and wonderfully is a claim about care

Here is the sentence, and it is one of the most familiar lines in the book, which is exactly why nobody hears it.

I will praise thee; for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works; and that my soul knoweth right well.Psalm 139:14

Fearfully made. Which in the older English means made with awe, made carefully, made in a way that ought to stop a person in their tracks.

Wonderfully made. Made in a way that produces wonder.

And notice: David is not saying this about somebody impressive. He is saying it about himself, in a psalm where he has just spent six verses on how thoroughly God knows the unimpressive parts of him.

Which lands on a man in a kitchen in a specific way. Because the quiet accusation you have never said out loud is not that God was unkind to you. It is that He was not paying much attention when He got to you. That you came out roughly, adequately, functionally, and that the careful work went into other people.

That is precisely what this verse denies.

You were made carefully, with attention, by somebody whose work in you the psalm calls marvelous, and there was no rough pass in your case. I am not stretching that. Psalm 139:14 says fearfully and wonderfully about an ordinary man's own body and life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a written line like that and lands it on a man at a stove at eleven forty on a Sunday.

The books were not wasted

And now a plain thing, because you have thought it and never said it.

Twenty-five years of reading an hour a night, with nobody ever asking you to say any of it out loud, has begun to feel like a private hobby that a serious man should probably have grown out of.

Watch what has actually happened, though.

You think about the Christmas lunch in September. That is not a catering skill. That is a mind that works a long way ahead, and it is the same mind that reads Romans three times.

Four people in that kitchen have been trained by you over the years, and every one of them can now do a thing they could not do, and none of them would describe what happened as being taught, and every one of them was taught.

I am not telling you that is your gift. I am telling you the twenty-five years did not vanish.

You have not been wasting an hour a night for twenty-five years, and the word does not measure a man's understanding by whether a room ever heard it. The psalm has God knowing a man's thoughts afar off without any audience involved, and the Spirit who searches all things has been in that room beside your bed every night for twenty-five years.

Handing it over, exactly

Here is the action, and I want to be precise, because the careless version of this insults a man.

Handing it over is not deciding you never wanted it.

It is not deciding it will never happen. You are sixty, not finished, and I am not going to pretend to know.

It is not deciding that cooking is your calling and being content. Nobody here is telling you what you are.

It is saying the thing out loud, once, in your own words, in a kitchen, and putting it in His hands rather than carrying it privately for another twenty-five years.

You are able to put it down without pretending you never wanted it, and Scripture nowhere asks a man to stop wanting a thing before he can hand it over. The psalm puts the making entirely in God's care and leaves the man free, and the Spirit who was given to help our infirmities is not waiting for you to feel content first.