I Cook Beautifully for Everybody Else

Tonight we are making a small pan of baked chicken and rice with greens, and it is for one person, and that is not a smaller version of anything.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Heat the oven to 400. In a small oven dish, stir together half a cup of rice, one cup of broth or water with a stock cube, half a chopped onion, salt and any dried herb. Lay two chicken thighs on top, skin up, and salt the skin properly. Cover tightly with foil and bake for thirty five minutes. Take the foil off, and bake fifteen more until the rice has absorbed everything and the chicken is browned and cooked all the way through with no pink at the bone. In the last five minutes, lay a big handful of greens on top and put the foil back so they steam. Lemon over the whole thing. It feeds one person generously, it costs a couple of dollars, and it is one dish.

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

It is that you will do this for anybody except yourself.

You will spend four hours on a meal for people you love, and enjoy every minute, and get the timings right, and put things in serving dishes. You have a reputation for it. People ask you to bring things.

And on an ordinary Tuesday, on your own, you will stand in the kitchen and decide that it is not worth making anything, and eat toast, and think absolutely nothing of it.

And here is the part I want to put in front of you, gently. You did not decide that once. You have been deciding it every day for a very long time, and the decision has become so ordinary that it does not feel like one.

The two words at the end of the second commandment

There is a sentence everybody knows, and the last two words are the ones that go missing.

And the second is like, namely this, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. There is none other commandment greater than these. (Mark 12:31, King James Version)

As thyself. Not instead of. Not after. As.

The whole command uses the love a person has for themselves as the unit of measurement for how they treat everybody else. Which means the measure was always assumed to be there, and it was assumed to be generous, and the instruction is to extend it outward rather than to have it in the first place.

And if the unit has quietly gone to almost nothing, then something has come loose in the middle of a command that Jesus called one of the two greatest there are.

You are inside that commandment and not standing outside serving it, and God has never once left the one doing the cooking off the list. Mark 12:31 makes a person's own care the measure of how they love everybody else, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen on an ordinary Tuesday.

You have not been overlooked in this, and heaven has never once needed a woman to disappear to be good. It is written that the second is like unto it, thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the oven is heating.

How the unit went to nothing

Now let me describe how this happens, because it does not happen through a decision and there is nobody to blame for it.

It happens through competence. A woman who is very good at feeding people gets asked to feed people. And she does, and she loves it, and she is thanked, and the whole arrangement is genuinely good.

And then, over years, the food becomes something that goes outward. It is what she does for others. And the idea of turning that same skill inward starts to feel faintly absurd, like using a good tool for the wrong job.

You are inside that commandment rather than serving it from outside, and God has never once left the cook off the list. Mark 12:31 makes a person's own care the measure for everybody else's, which is the written word and not my flattery, and the Holy Spirit is the one who restores a unit that quietly went to nothing.

So the four hour meal and the piece of toast are not a contradiction inside one person. They are two entirely different categories, and only one of them is about food.

Eating toast alone on a Tuesday is not a verdict on a person's worth.

You are not selfish for cooking for yourself, and God has never once made a woman's disappearance the condition of her goodness. The passage puts self and neighbor in one sentence as a single measure, and the Spirit of God is the one who restores a unit that has quietly gone to nothing.

You have been giving away something that was never meant to run in only one direction. Mark 12 has Jesus name two commandments and refuse to separate them, and the Holy Spirit is the one who keeps them joined in an ordinary kitchen.

Cook for yourself the way you cook for company

Here is the practical part, and there is one rule in it.

Cook this for yourself, and cook it the way you would cook it for somebody you wanted to impress.

That means salt the chicken skin properly. Get the foil on tightly. Take the trouble with the greens. Squeeze the lemon over it at the end rather than deciding that is only for guests.

You are owed the standard you hand out constantly, and God has never once set two prices on the same care. The same Spirit who breathed Mark 12:31 is in this kitchen, and the written word there refuses to separate the loving of a neighbor from the loving of a self.

And then set your own place. A real plate, a glass, a napkin if you use them for other people.

Because the instruction is not simply to eat. It is to receive the same standard of care you hand out constantly, and the only way to test whether that unit is still working is to point it at yourself and watch what happens.

You will probably feel slightly ridiculous. That feeling is the whole diagnosis.

You are owed exactly the standard you hand out to everybody else, and God has never once set two prices on the same care. Mark 12:31 will not separate the loving of a neighbor from the loving of a self, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes an ordinary Tuesday dinner into a repair of something structural.