cooking
While I dice the chicken, one hand gripping the knife, I teach Riley how to make potato salad.
“So, what’s the next thing you need to do?” I ask her, nodding toward an armful of a silver bowl piled high with tender chopped potatoes. Two eggs, hardboiled with the potatoes, peek out from among the hillocks.
“Uhhh, where’s the recipe?” Riley says, casting about her for the kind of instructions she prefers, written, preferably numbered, preferably with check boxes beside. But so much of home cooking must be the recall of reflexes. I am teaching her my way, with the hope that eventually she will be able to discern it in an instant.
“There’s no recipe,” I tell her, smiling wide, feeling a twinge of joy both about the oral history I’m passing—this is how my mom made potato salad and her mom before–and about the opportunity this process gives Riley to learn to trust her own instincts.
“Okay, well, I guess I need to…peel the eggs?”
“Exactly,” I say. “And then you need to?”
“Chop them.”
“Exactly! See? You knew, and without a recipe.”
“Yay,” she says, opening a cabinet, bending to pull out a cutting board.
She moves to the other side of the kitchen, searching for the right knife. Every week now, we engage in a kind of dance, shimmying and twirling around each other, with me calling out moves to her as we go. She laughs when I start to hum or sing phrases of a familiar tune—you pick me up; you turn me ‘round; you plant my feet on solid ground—as I put something in the oven or stir a sauce simmering on the stove or as the water splashes, sloshing over my hands at the sink.
When I told Riley we needed to do this, that she needed to work in the kitchen with me so that we could build her skills for independence, she was cheerful and agreeable, as she always is—“sounds good to me, Mom,” but I knew that she found it far more enticing to do something with me than to build her own skills. At least initially, it was that part, that we would work together, that drew Riley efficiently out of her routines and into the kitchen.
I smile now, fingers slippery on raw meat, thinking tangentially about how long it took for God to change me into someone who engages with Him because I love to be with Him, to do things in Him, and not merely as a means for self-construction, as if spiritual formation could ever be a work I do for myself. In fact, until He so shifted my motivation, I struggled to find the time to withdraw from my own plans to a place of quiet rest and transformation.
For Riley, this has long been the key. For with-ness, for relationship alone, she can shrug off futility in favor of productivity. The same is true for me.
As it turns out, productivity and multiplication, or fruit-bearing, to borrow the metaphor from scripture, occur as the natural result of engagement on the basis of relationship, of making our home in the Trinity, something Jesus describes as remaining in the vine. Very early on, I realized, with some surprise, that not only did these afternoon cooking sessions give me an opportunity to train Riley, but her work alongside me actually provides some very real help to me. It bears fruit, both in transformation for her and multiplication for me. With Riley in the kitchen, I finish the week’s cooking much more quickly.
“Wow, you’re such a big help,” I said to her on our first day. “I finished so much earlier because you helped me.”
She had grinned, elated by this revelation, and said, “I should help you every week.” I realized then that the idea that she could be of service to me during our cooking time made this an entirely different sort of opportunity for her.
“I like helping you,” she says now, as though privy to my thinking, her fingers pulling eggshell away from egg with precision. In fact, it isn’t a stretch to say that Riley lives to help, that serving others is the natural outpouring of her heart. Ask her to help and her answer is always yes. Tell her she has helped, and her response is joy.
When Riley finishes peeling and chopping the eggs, when she is certain she has executed the task in a way that pleases me, she will immediately ask, “What else can I do?” In advance, I silently plan her next steps– the salad, then a breakfast casserole, then the sauce for our favorite chicken entrée.
Christ said He came not to be served but to serve, which is also the unarticulated sentiment expressed in Riley’s delight, and watching her, how gently she places the naked eggs on the cutting board in front of her, how purposefully she picks up the knife, I am faced with the understanding that in saying this, Christ has not merely described an agenda, but has revealed something about His true nature. It is not in His nature to expect that someone else should cater to His needs, but serving others is in fact his natural inclination. He cannot behave any other way. He does not need to remind himself, as I do, to keep things in such careful order. So, when I ask Him to make me a servant, I am actually asking for a new heart, a heart like His, not a new set of behaviors or a strategy for self-discipline.
Riley has not chosen to be someone who loves to serve; she has not purposed in her own heart to make it so or buckled down against a natural desire to serve herself instead. This is God’s grace to Riley, a way that she bears His image. She loves people. She loves being with people, and, as a natural outpouring of that love, she loves helping people.
“Mom Jones, how does this look?” She asks now, tilting the cutting board slightly so that I can see the pile of diced egg, the dry, sunny yellow flecked with bits of boiled white. She uses her knife like a dam, blocking the egg, while she waits on my approval.
“Just perfect,” I say. “It looks perfect.”
