Her Card Is Still In The Drawer

You read it without lifting it out.

The drawer was open for something else and there it was, third or fourth back, and you read the whole thing standing there with your hand on the drawer front and did not touch it.

Her handwriting. The way she did the number four. The word she abbreviated that nobody else abbreviates.

And there is a smudge at the bottom corner that is probably from her hands, from that kitchen, from a day nobody remembers, and you have never once let yourself think about that for longer than a second.

Four years. It has been in that drawer the whole time and you have not made it.

And you could. You have the card and you can cook and it is not a complicated thing. It is the sort of recipe that has eight items and no method to speak of, because she never wrote the method down, because she assumed anybody reading it would know.

That is the part that stops you, and I think you know it: you would have to guess at the half of it she did not write.

And if you guess wrong, it will not taste right. And if it does not taste right, then the last version of that thing in the world will have been made badly by you.

So it stays in the drawer.

Let me be plain about two things before anything else.

The first is that this article is about her before it is about food. It will get to the cooking, and the cooking is not the point of it.

And the second: deciding not to make it is a completely good ending to this article. If you get to the last line and decide that card stays in the drawer, you will have done the assignment properly. There is no outcome I am steering you toward.

This do in remembrance of me

There is a moment at a table in Luke, and I want to handle it carefully.

And he took bread, and gave thanks, and brake it, and gave unto them, saying, This is my body which is given for you: this do in remembrance of me. (Luke 22:19, King James Version)

This do in remembrance of me.

Now, I am not going to draw a line from that table to your mother's card as though they were the same kind of thing. They are not, and the difference is not a small one, and I would not insult either of them by blurring it.

What I want from this verse is one observation about how remembrance works, and it is this.

He did not say: think about me. He said: do this.

The remembering He established was not an interior act. It was a thing done with hands, with ordinary food, at a table, by people together. Bread taken, thanks given, bread broken, bread handed over. Physical, repeatable, and available to anybody with a loaf.

And notice what the bread was. Ordinary bread, of the kind on every table in that city that week. Nothing about the material was special, and the significance was not carried by the quality of the loaf.

Nobody has ever made that bread wrong.

That is the thing I want to put beside your drawer. In the remembering that God Himself established, the doing is what remembers, and the standard of the food is not part of it anywhere.

So whatever you would be doing with that card, the accuracy of the result is not what makes it a remembering. Doing it is.

The remembering God established is a thing done with hands and ordinary food, and the quality of it has never once been what carried the remembering. Luke 22:19 says this do in remembrance of me over bread that was in every house that week, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody reading a card without touching it.

You cannot get her wrong

Here is the practical half, and it is the fear itself.

You are afraid of making a mistake that damages something.

That is what is underneath four years of a closed drawer. Somewhere it became settled that her version is fixed and complete and finished, and that a poor attempt by you would be added to it, and would alter it, and that the whole thing would end up slightly worse than it was.

That is not how any of this works, and it is worth saying directly.

She is not stored in that dish. Your mother is not held in a set of proportions on an index card, and your version of it, however it comes out, cannot reach backwards and change one thing about her or about the times she made it.

If you cook it and it is wrong, what exists afterward is: her, exactly as before, and a slightly disappointing pan of something on a Tuesday.

That is the whole risk. It is much smaller than the one you have been carrying.

And here is the other half of it, which is the part I think you have not considered.

She left the method out because she assumed you would know.

That card is not a set of instructions for a stranger. It is a note between two people who cooked in the same kitchen, and the missing half was left out on purpose, because she expected the person reading it to have watched her do it.

Which means the gaps are not a problem in the card. They are the shape of a relationship. And your guesses at them are not contamination; they are precisely what she assumed would happen, which is you, in a kitchen, working out the part she did not write.

She is not held in a set of proportions, and your version has never once been able to reach backwards and alter hers. The written word makes the doing the remembrance and never grades the bread, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has kept a drawer shut for four years.

Take it out, read it aloud, and then decide

So here is the assignment, and it has three parts, and the third is genuinely open.

Take the card out, read it out loud, and cook it this week or decide not to.

First: take it out of the drawer.

Lift it. Hold it. That is more than you have done in four years and it is the largest part of this assignment, whatever happens afterward.

Second: read it out loud, in the room, in your own voice.

All of it, including the abbreviation and the numbers. Out loud, standing in your kitchen.

That is where the grief is, and I want to be honest with you about it rather than pretend this is a cooking exercise. Reading her handwriting in your own voice may do something considerable. Let it. There is nothing to manage and nobody is watching, and if you put the card down halfway through and stop, you have still taken it out and heard her hand in your own mouth, and that is a real thing to have done.

And third: cook it this week or decide not to.

And I mean both of those, equally, without preference.

If you cook it: guess at the missing parts and let it be however it turns out. Do not phone anybody to check. Do not try to get it right, because right is not available and its absence is not a fault. Make it and eat it.

If you decide not to: say that out loud too. Not this year. And put the card back in the drawer deliberately, with your hands, having chosen it.

The difference between four years of it sitting there and a card put back on purpose is the whole of what I am after. One is avoidance and the other is a decision, and they look identical from outside and are not the same thing at all.

You are able to take it out and choose either way, and putting it back on purpose has never once been the same as leaving it there. Luke 22:19 makes the doing what remembers, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody reading her mother's handwriting out loud in a kitchen.