The Recipe Box

The box is wooden and it was her mother's and there are, she thinks, about a hundred and forty cards in it.

Some are typed. Most are handwritten, and about a third of those are in hands belonging to women who are dead. There is one from a neighbor who moved away in 1988. There is one written on the back of a feed store receipt in her aunt's writing, and that aunt could not spell and it is one of her favorite objects on earth.

She adds to it still. Somebody at a funeral said something about a cake in March and she wrote it down that evening on a card, properly, in pen, and put it in the box.

She has cooked from it perhaps four times in thirty years.

Not because she cannot cook. She cooks constantly. She makes the same eleven things, well, in rotation, and everybody in that family has an opinion about which one is best.

The box sits on the shelf above the flour and she opens it maybe once a month and goes through it the way you would go through photographs.

And in July her granddaughter, who is nineteen and does not have a filter, said: are you ever going to make any of these?

And she laughed and said something about time.

And then she stood in that kitchen after the girl had gone and thought about her aunt's handwriting on the back of a feed store receipt, and how it has been in a box for thirty years, and how the woman who wrote it made that thing every single week and never once wrote anything down about it except when she was asked.

The one who digs is the one who does

Let me say the fair thing about the box first, because it is not a monument to failure.

That box is a real inheritance. Nobody else in the family has kept anything like it and when you are gone somebody is going to hold that feed store receipt and cry. Keeping it was worth doing. It is not vanity and it is not hoarding.

Now hear this, and take it as settled rather than as a nudge: what is in that box has never once been the difficulty, and you have not been short of instruction for thirty years. That is not my brisk reading of a full shelf, it is what stands written in Luke's sixth chapter, where the Lord describes two men and puts the whole difference in one place, and the same Holy Spirit who preserved that picture was in your kitchen in July after the girl went out.

Read it, and watch what the man who lasts actually does.

As for everyone who comes to me and hears my words and puts them into practice, I will show you what they are like. They are like a man building a house, who dug down deep and laid the foundation on rock.Luke 6:47-48

Dug down deep. That is a doing word and it is a slow one and there is dirt in it.

Both men in that passage had access to the same words. The one whose house stood was not better informed. He was the one who went out with a shovel, and the Lord describes the digging rather than the knowing because the digging is the whole of what separates them.

So this is yours right now rather than pending a free afternoon: you have everything required, and you have had it for thirty years, because the written word puts the difference in the doing rather than in the collecting, and the Spirit of God is the one who put your aunt's receipt into your hands in the first place.

Now let me tell you what the box has quietly become, and it will not be comfortable but it is not a rebuke either.

A card is a promise from somebody who is not here any more. Every time you open that box you are visiting them, and it is genuinely lovely, and it also means the promises stay promises. Nothing on a card can go wrong. Nothing in a box comes out badly, or tastes different to how you remember, or turns out to be a bit much for modern taste.

The eleven things you actually cook are the ones you have risked. That is why they are good, and what is written blesses the doing rather than the keeping, and the Holy Spirit is not protective of a promise that was meant to be spent.

And here is the piece that matters most: your aunt did not write things down. She made them. What is written says a doer of the word is blessed in the doing itself, and the Holy Spirit works through a woman's hands in a kitchen far more readily than through her filing.