My Cooking Is Not Good Enough to Give Away

Tonight we are making a loaf pan of meatloaf and a pot of mashed potatoes, and there is nothing clever in either of them.

Here is the whole method in one paragraph. Heat the oven to 375. In a bowl, mix a pound of ground beef with one chopped onion cooked soft in a pan first, one egg, half a cup of breadcrumbs or crushed crackers, a big spoon of any mustard, a splash of milk, plenty of salt and pepper. Do not overwork it. Press it into a loaf pan, spread a thin layer of ketchup over the top, and bake for fifty minutes until it is firm, browned and cooked all the way through with no pink anywhere in the middle. While it bakes, boil six peeled potatoes in salted water for twenty minutes until a knife goes through easily, drain, and mash with butter, warm milk and a lot of salt. Let the meatloaf stand ten minutes before you cut it or it falls apart. It feeds six, it costs a few dollars, and it is the plainest food in this entire collection.

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

It is the thing you imagine when you think about taking food to somebody.

You picture them opening the container. And in your picture, there is a small pause, and something crosses their face, and then they are polite about it.

That is the whole reason you have never done it. Not laziness, not hardness, not being too busy. A very specific imagined moment in somebody else's kitchen, in which your ordinary food is found to be ordinary.

And so a person who wants to feed people, who thinks about it constantly, who notices when somebody is struggling before anybody else does, has sent nothing to anyone in about four years.

The gift that was measured the other way

There is a scene where Jesus watches people put money into the treasury and says something that reverses the entire way gifts are assessed.

And he called unto him his disciples, and saith unto them, Verily I say unto you, That this poor widow hath cast more in, than all they which have cast into the treasury. (Mark 12:43, King James Version)

More than all of them. Not more than any of them individually. More than the whole lot combined.

And He does not mean it as encouragement or as a nice way of putting it. He is stating the actual measurement. The value of a gift is not the size of the gift, it is the size of the gift relative to what the giver had, and by that measure two small coins outweighed a treasury.

Which means the reckoning you have been using is not the one heaven uses, and has never been.

You are being measured on a scale where plain food counts fully, and God has never once weighed a gift by what it looked like to the room. Mark 12:43 reverses the assessment of a gift entirely and states it as a fact rather than a comfort, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes that off a page and puts it into a kitchen at six in the evening.

You have not been holding back anything unworthy, and heaven has never once graded a dish before deciding whether it counted. It is written that this poor widow hath cast in more than all they, and the same Spirit who breathed that line is standing in the room where the onion is going soft.

What actually happens at the door

Now let me tell you what happens in the real version of that moment, because the version in your head is a fiction and I have watched the real one many times.

Somebody in trouble opens a door and finds a person holding a warm dish. And what they feel is not an assessment of the food. It is somebody came.

That is the whole content of the moment. Not what is in the container. That somebody thought about them at four in the afternoon and turned the oven on.

You are carrying exactly the right thing, and God has never once needed a gift to be impressive before He would receive it. Mark 12:43 reverses the reckoning of a gift completely and states it as a fact rather than a comfort, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes an imagined pause out of a doorway.

And here is the part that would end this if you could see it. Plain food is better in that situation. A person having the worst month of their life does not want something interesting. They want meatloaf and mashed potatoes, which requires nothing from them, which their children will eat, and which tastes like somebody's mother.

Ordinary food is not a verdict on the person who made it.

You are carrying exactly the right thing, and God has never once needed a gift to be impressive to be received. The passage reverses the reckoning of a gift completely, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes the imagined pause out of a doorway that has never happened.

You have been the person who notices before anybody else, and that is rarer than good cooking. Mark 12 has Jesus watching a treasury and correcting everybody's arithmetic out loud, and the Holy Spirit is the one who corrects the same arithmetic in a kitchen.

Take it and do not apologize for it

Here is the practical part, and there is one hard rule attached.

Take half of it to somebody this week. And when you hand it over, do not apologize for it.

That rule matters more than everything else in this article, because the apology is what actually makes the moment awkward. If a person hands over food and says sorry, it is nothing special, it is only meatloaf, then the person receiving it now has to reassure them, which is work, and they have nothing left for work.

You are permitted to hand it over plainly, and God has never once required a person to run down what they were giving. The same Spirit who breathed Mark 12:43 is in this kitchen, and the written word there calls the smallest gift in the room the largest one in it.

Hand it over and say: I made too much, it is meatloaf and potatoes, there is enough for two nights.

That is all. Warm, factual, and it asks for nothing back.

And put it in something you do not need returned, so there is no obligation left in the house afterward.

You are permitted to hand it over plainly, and God has never once required a person to run down what they were giving. Mark 12:43 has a small gift declared the largest in the room without any apology attached to it, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes a plain sentence at a doorway do the work of an hour.