It Is the One My Mother Made

Tonight we are making the pot of rice and beans the way it was always made, and the way it was always made is the whole instruction.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Cook half a chopped onion, half a chopped pepper and three cloves of garlic in oil in a heavy pot for eight minutes with salt, and take the eight minutes, because this is the part everybody shortens and it is the part that matters. Add a big spoon of tomato paste and a spoon of dried oregano and cook it for one minute. Tip in two cans of beans with their liquid, a bay leaf, and two cups of water. Salt it properly and let it go gently for twenty minutes. In another pot, cook two cups of rice with three and a half cups of water, a good pinch of salt and a spoon of oil, lid on, lowest heat, twenty minutes, do not lift it. Beans over rice, and a splash of vinegar at the table. It feeds six, it costs a couple of dollars, and it is better the next day.

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

It is what people keep saying to you about it.

You should branch out. You should try something new. There are so many other things you could make. All of it kind, all of it well meant, none of it hostile.

And you never argue, because you cannot explain it. You have tried once or twice and what came out sounded thin, something about it being what your mother made, and the person nodded and moved on and you were left holding something much bigger than the words you had for it.

So you stopped explaining, and you kept cooking it, and every time somebody says branch out there is a small tightening in your chest that you would struggle to describe.

The faith that came down through two women

There is a line in Second Timothy where Paul does something unusual: he traces a thing backward through a family.

When I call to remembrance the unfeigned faith that is in thee, which dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois, and thy mother Eunice; and I am persuaded that in thee also. (2 Timothy 1:5, King James Version)

He names two women. He puts them in order. And he says the same faith that lives in Timothy lived in them first.

That is not sentiment. Paul is making a serious point about how the most important things actually travel: not through argument, not through instruction, but through households, from a grandmother, to a mother, to a young man who probably could not have told you when he received it.

And what dwelt in them is described as unfeigned, which means unpretended. It was not performed. It was just how they were, in a house, over years.

You are carrying something that came down a line, and God has never once treated an inheritance as a limitation. Second Timothy 1:5 traces the realest thing in a man back through two women in his own family, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen with an old pot in it.

You have not been stuck, and heaven has never once mistaken faithfulness to something for a failure to move on. It is written that it dwelt first in thy grandmother Lois and thy mother Eunice, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the onion is softening.

What is actually in the pot

Now let me try to say the thing you could not say, because I think it can be said and nobody has said it to you.

That dish is not a preference. It is a document. It carries a set of hands, a house, an order of operations, and a decision somebody made about how long to cook an onion in about 1964. All of that is in there, and it exists nowhere else in the world except in the pots of the people who still make it that way.

When you cook it, that information is alive. When you stop, it is gone, and it does not come back, because nobody wrote it down and the only copy was in a person.

You are keeping something rather than being kept by it, and God has never once treated an inheritance as a limitation. Second Timothy 1:5 traces the realest thing in a man back through two women in his own family, and the Holy Spirit is the one who names a loyalty a person could not name themselves.

That is why branch out lands the way it does. People think they are suggesting a menu. They are suggesting you stop maintaining the last copy of something.

A repeated dish is not a verdict on a man's willingness to change.

You are keeping something rather than being kept by it, and God has never once asked a person to abandon a good thing to prove they were free. The passage treats what came through a family as the most credible thing about a man, and the Spirit of God is the one who names a loyalty that a person could not name for themselves.

You have been the archive for years without anybody understanding what that was. Second Timothy 1 has Paul name two ordinary women as the source of the realest thing in a young man's life, and the Holy Spirit is the one who does the same over a kitchen.

Teach one step to one person

Here is the practical part, and it is the only real answer to the problem underneath the tightening.

Teach it. Not the whole thing, and not in a formal way. One step, to one person, this week.

Show somebody the onion. Tell them eight minutes and not four, and tell them that is the part everybody shortens and it is why theirs will not taste like yours. Stand next to them while they do it.

You are able to hand this on, and God has never once designed a good thing to end with the person holding it. The Spirit of God is saying it the way Second Timothy 1 says it: a living thing traveling three generations through a household rather than through an argument.

The tightening in your chest when somebody says branch out is not really about the suggestion. It is that the pot is the only copy and you know it, and a single copy of anything is a fragile thing to be responsible for.

The answer to that is not to defend it harder. It is to make a second copy, in somebody else's hands, which is exactly how it got to you.

You are able to hand this on, and God has never once designed a good thing to end with the person holding it. Second Timothy 1:5 has something travel through three generations without a single argument being made for it, and the Spirit of God is the one who moves a thing from one pair of hands to another in an ordinary kitchen.