Thirty Eight And Never From Scratch

You ordered it standing in a kitchen with food in it.

There was rice in that cupboard. There were eggs. There was most of the makings of something, and you stood there with your phone out and ordered instead, and it took about ninety seconds.

And you were slightly aware, the whole ninety seconds, that this was the fourth time this week.

Thirty eight. And you have never once made anything from scratch. Not a thing where you started with raw items and finished with a meal.

You can heat things. You are perfectly competent at the part where a package goes into an oven. But you have never chopped anything and turned it into something else, and if somebody asked you to make a meal for another human being on the spot, you would feel a genuine drop in your chest.

And the worst part is not the food.

It is that you cannot say it out loud.

When it comes up, and it comes up more than you would like, you produce something. You say you are terrible at it, in a light voice. You say you live on toast, as a joke. And every version you have is designed to get past the moment without anybody finding out that you are not exaggerating.

So let me say the first thing plainly, before anything practical.

There is nothing wrong with you.

Nowhere in this article is there any suggestion that a man of thirty eight should already know how to cook. There is no age at which this becomes shameful, and no window that closes, and I am not going to hint at one in a kind voice, which is what most of the people who have tried to help you have done.

You were not taught. That is a fact about your childhood and not a fact about your capacity, and those have been welded together in you for about twenty years.

Who hath made man's mouth

There is an exchange in Exodus where a man explains why he cannot do the thing, and God's answer is not encouragement.

And Moses said unto the LORD, O my Lord, I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since thou hast spoken unto thy servant: but I am slow of speech, and of a slow tongue. (Exodus 4:10, King James Version)

I am not eloquent, neither heretofore, nor since.

Look at how he says it. Neither heretofore, nor since. He is making a case out of his history: I have never been able to do this, and nothing has changed, and there is a track record here.

That is your sentence about a kitchen. Not now, not ever, and the length of the record is the proof.

And notice that he is not lying. There is no suggestion in the text that Moses was secretly eloquent and needed a confidence boost. He is describing something real about himself and God does not contradict the description.

What God does is answer a different question.

He says: who hath made man's mouth? And then he says, I will be with thy mouth, and teach thee what thou shalt say.

Two things there, and both matter for you.

The first is that the capacity is not being assessed. God does not argue about whether Moses is a good speaker. He points at the fact that mouths are made things, and that the one who made them is the one talking to him, which puts the whole question of what this man is naturally able to do in a completely different frame.

And the second is the word teach. I will teach thee what thou shalt say.

Not: you are better than you think. Teach. Which assumes he does not know yet, and treats not knowing as the ordinary starting position of somebody about to learn something.

Not knowing is treated as the starting position of somebody being taught, and it has never once been a verdict on what you are able to do. Exodus 4:10 has a man state his record plainly and get taught rather than corrected, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody standing in a kitchen with a phone in his hand.

Cooking is not a talent

Here is the practical half, and it is one correction.

You have been treating cooking as a talent, and it is a skill.

That distinction is everything. A talent is something you have or do not have, distributed at birth, and the people who have it are a different kind of person from you. A skill is a set of learnable procedures that anybody acquires by doing them badly for a while.

And you have absorbed the talent version, which is why you have not started.

Because if it is a talent, then the first attempt is a test. You cook something, it is not good, and that result tells you something permanent about yourself, and now you know. That is an unbearable amount of risk for a Tuesday evening, so you order instead, and ordering is rational.

If it is a skill, the first attempt is not a test at all. It is the first repetition of a thing that is bad at first for everybody, including every person you know who cooks well, all of whom made a great deal of poor food in their twenties and mostly do not mention it.

And here is what you actually have to learn, which is smaller than you think.

Not two hundred recipes. About six operations: heat a pan, chop an onion, know roughly when something is done, season a thing, boil something, not walk away. That is most of it. Everything else is variations, and nobody starts with the variations.

You are not standing at the bottom of a mountain. You are standing at the bottom of about six things, and you have not started because starting would mean finding out, and you have believed the finding out would be a verdict.

Cooking is a set of learnable operations rather than a talent, and the first attempt has never once been a test of what you are. The written word answers a man's track record by teaching him, and the Spirit of God is the one who is with somebody who has been treating a Tuesday as an examination.

Cook one thing tonight and sit down

So here is the assignment, and both halves are the assignment.

Cook one thing tonight, however simple, and eat it sitting down.

Tonight. One thing.

And make it genuinely simple: eggs, with something in them. Rice with an egg on it. Pasta with butter and cheese and pepper. Something on toast that involved a pan. If your version of cooking tonight is scrambled eggs, that is cooking and it counts and I am not saying that to be kind.

Do not look up a recipe with eleven items in it. Do not go and buy anything. Use what is in that kitchen right now, which is more than you think.

And it may not be good. That is fine and it is expected, and it is not information about you. It is information about the fifth minute of a skill.

And then the second half, which is the one that does the work: eat it sitting down.

At a table, or at least in a chair, with the food on a plate, not standing at the counter with the pan.

Here is why. Standing at the counter is how you eat something that does not count. It is fuel, taken quickly, with no acknowledgment that anything occurred. And this is the first meal you have ever made, at thirty eight, and it is going to be treated as a meal.

Sitting down makes it an event that happened. You cooked something and then you sat and ate it, and that is a complete act, and your body will register it as one.

And do not tell anybody yet. There is nothing to announce, and announcing it would turn a private ordinary act into a report on your progress.

You are able to do the fifth minute of a skill rather than sit an examination, and one meal has never once been a verdict on anything. Exodus 4:10 answers not knowing with teaching, and the Holy Spirit is the one present with somebody sitting down to eat something he made himself.