Grace and Cooking

It’s Bread & Wine week!!  This week I’m devoting myself to all things relating to ShaunaNiequist’s new book Bread &Wine: My Love Letter to Life Around the Table, with Recipes.  Tomorrow I’ll share my thoughts on the book itself (spoiler alert: I loved it.)  As I read Bread & Wine I kept coming back to this idea, this truth from my life about grace and cooking.  So today I’m going to share what I’ve discovered.  Later in the week I’ll tell you all about the dinner party I threw in honor of Bread & Wine (aka the best dinner party I ever threw).  And check back here on Friday for a GIVE-AWAY!!!

I never used to be all that interested in cooking.  In college I mostly ate tuna fish and crackers and cheerios.  While registering for wedding gifts at Crate & Barrel I may or may not have burst into tears in front of the wall of kitchen gadgets because I didn’t know what any of them were used for.  At my wedding shower my sister gave me a list of restaurants in the area that delivered.  My reputation for cooking was widely known.

Cooking just made me nervous.  The recipes weren’t always precise.  Following the directions didn’t always guarantee success.  It seemed to me that cooking required you to depend on instincts about food that I didn’t yet have.  You relied on feelings about food and trust in their “doneness.”  And the stakes felt so high with cooking.  If it didn’t turn out all that food (and money) was wasted!  Or what if it tasted really bad?  What would we eat instead?  And the choices!  There seemed to me to be all sorts of choices I had to make with cooking, all kinds of options for substitutions.  What if I made the wrong choice?  It was too intimidating, too risky.  Cooking wasn’t like baking.  Baking had clear rules.  Follow the recipe exactly, mix the specified amounts of the specific ingredients, bake for the instructed time and voila!  Cupcakes.  It didn’t really require me to guess or trust my gut.  I could follow the rules and was rewarded for my obedience.

The deeper truth about my relationship to cooking vs. baking boiled down to this:  becoming proficient at cooking required trial and error, failing and learning from my mistakes, screwing up and giving myself grace and moving on, something that made me extremely uncomfortable.  Baking meanwhile was black and white- just follow the rules to a “T” and you succeed.  In my early twenties I was paralyzed by the idea of failing.  I wanted clear-cut rules to follow so I wouldn’t disappoint anyone.  The way that I baked was boring and required little creativity, but at least I knew what was expected of me. 

When I was 25 I was finally confronted by my worth earning, perfectionist, grace denying junk through an internship at a large church in the area.  I was making the career shift from teaching to youth ministry and had decided to do this internship to give me some hands on experience in ministry so that someone would actually hire me.  I was just looking for a resume boost.  It ended up changing the way I thought about God and grace and myself.

Part of the internship required some intensive counseling type mentoring.  I met one-on-one with Deirdre and Bryan and Devon each week.  Each person acted as a therapist and grace dispenser and listener and exact right question asker.  Deirdre helped me walk through failure.  She took me down the path of facing my fears, naming the worst possible outcomes and then helped me to see that it wasn’t really the end of the world after all.  If I did in fact fail, disappoint, come up short, my life would go on.  I’d survive.  Devon helped me to recognize the constant, graceless internal dialogue I had with myself and introduced me to a voice much more loving and reasonable.  Bryan in particular met me in my brokenness with supernatural grace.  Each week I would confess all the ugly thoughts and feelings I tried to hide from the world lest they figure out the real me and each week he accepted it all without batting an eye.  I would unload all my shame and he would respond with grace.  I expected every confession to elicit disappointment, to taint his opinion of me.  And every time he would remind me why it was perfectly normal for me to feel/think/respond in a particular way and show me that I wasn’t a monster unworthy of love after all.  Bryan made me start to believe that perhaps God wasn’t completely disappointed with all the ways I couldn’t seem to get it together either.  Through these mentors, these giants of grace, I met, for the first time, the God of grace.

And it was there smack in the middle of my twenties that my relationship with God shifted from baking to cooking.  I had been living a life with God that looked a lot like a complicated baking recipe.  There were a lot of legalistic steps and rules but if I could just follow them perfectly I would be rewarded with God’s approval.  As long as I didn’t take any risks, didn’t make any mistakes the cupcakes of God’s love were mine for the taking.  Once I began to understand the God of grace we started cooking together.  I was free to make some mistakes and learn from them.  Free to try some new things and fail, knowing that failure wasn’t the worst thing in the world.  Free to have grace for myself in the process of this life I was cooking up.

This way of living found its way into my kitchen as well.  Cooking became much more fun.   Burning dinner or cooking something that didn’t taste great wasn’t the end of the world and didn’t mean I was unworthy.  It just meant we got to have take-out later.  I learned that substituting an ingredient here and there sometimes made the meal even better than if I’d stuck to the recipe.  I learned from my mistakes and then I didn’t make the same mistake again.  Perhaps the best lesson I learned in the kitchen was that it was harder than I thought to completely ruin a meal and, more often than not, adding more cheese covered any mistake I made. 

I’ve found the same is true for life.  It’s harder than I expect to ruin relationships by revealing the real me.  In fact being honest about my shortcomings, hard parts and vulnerabilities usually brought me closer to others.  And, more often than not, adding more grace covers all things.