I Call Myself Unimaginative

Tonight we are making a pot of pinto beans with a skillet of fried onions on top, and the onions are what turn it from a cheap dinner into a good one.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Put a pound of dried pinto beans in a pot with plenty of water, a halved onion, three cloves of garlic and a bay leaf, and bring it up. Skim off anything that foams, then turn it right down and let it go for two hours with the lid ajar, topping up with hot water if it gets low. Do not salt it until the last twenty minutes, because salt early keeps the skins tough. Salt it heavily at the end and let it sit. While it finishes, slice two onions thin and fry them in a good amount of oil in a skillet for fifteen minutes, past the point where you would stop, until they are dark brown and crisp at the edges. Salt them. Beans in a bowl, onions piled on top, vinegar or hot sauce over everything. It feeds eight, it costs about two dollars, and it is one of the best things in this entire collection.

Now, the reason I am writing is not the beans.

It is a word you have started using about yourself.

Unimaginative. Boring. Stuck in a rut. You have said one of those out loud in the last month, about your own cooking, in a tone that was meant to sound light.

And it is not true, and I want to show you why it is not true, because you have quietly accepted a fault that belongs somewhere else entirely.

The menu is flat because the money is flat. That is the whole explanation. Variety costs, and there is no version of that sentence where it does not, and you have been calling an arithmetic problem a character problem for a long time.

The verse about what a gift is measured against

There is a line in Second Corinthians about giving that is really about accounting.

For if there be first a willing mind, it is accepted according to that a man hath, and not according to that he hath not. (2 Corinthians 8:12, King James Version)

Read the two halves at the end. According to what a man has. Not according to what he does not have.

That is a measurement rule, stated plainly, and it is one of the most useful sentences in the New Testament for anybody living close to the line. What is not in your hand is not part of the assessment. It is not counted. It does not appear anywhere in the reckoning.

And notice what is counted: a willing mind. The intention and the actual resource, and nothing else.

You are being measured against what is in your hand, and God has never once weighed a person by what was not in it. Second Corinthians 8:12 makes the absent thing explicitly excluded from the reckoning, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen where the same beans go on again.

You have not fallen short of any standard heaven applies, and there is no ledger where an unaffordable thing counts against a man. It is written that it is accepted according to that a man hath, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the onions are going dark.

Put the fault back where it belongs

Now let me be direct, because this misfiling has been costing you and it is fixable in one move.

There are two possible explanations for a flat menu. One is that a person lacks ideas. The other is that a person lacks money. They produce exactly the same dinner, which is why they get confused, and only one of them is a fault in the person.

And you know which one it is. You could name six things you would cook this week if the money were there. That is what having ideas looks like. A man with no imagination cannot produce that list.

You are not short of ideas, and God has never once judged a table by what its owner could not afford to put on it. Second Corinthians 8:12 removes the absent resource from the reckoning entirely, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes a fault off a man and puts it back on an arithmetic.

So the word is wrong, and it has been doing damage, because a person who believes they are unimaginative stops trying things, and then the menu really does go flat, and the belief manufactures its own evidence.

A repeated cheap dinner is not a verdict on a man's imagination.

You are not short of ideas, and God has never once judged a table by what its owner could not afford to put on it. The passage explicitly removes the absent resource from the calculation, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes a fault off a man and puts it back on an arithmetic.

You have been carrying somebody else's problem as though it were a fault in you. Second Corinthians 8 is written to people who were themselves poor and were being commended, and the Holy Spirit is the one who applies that same reckoning in a kitchen.

Spend the one thing that is free

Here is the practical part, and it is where the money is not.

Fifteen minutes on the onions.

That is the whole thing. It is free. It costs nothing but time, and it is the single biggest difference between a bowl of beans that is dull and a bowl of beans that people ask for.

Most people stop frying onions at about six minutes, when they have gone soft and pale. The transformation happens between minute eight and minute fifteen, when they go brown and sweet and crisp at the edges, and almost nobody waits for it.

That is not a trick and it is not a substitute for money. It is the one ingredient in this whole article that is genuinely free, and it is available to you in exactly the same quantity as it is available to anybody.

You have access to the thing that actually makes food good, and God has never once put the best part of a dish behind a price. Second Corinthians 8:12 counts the willing mind and the actual resource, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes fifteen minutes over a pan into the difference nobody had to buy.