Every Recipe and No Answers

His mother is seventy-eight and cooks with her hands, which is the whole problem.

She does not measure. She takes salt out of the jar in the crook of two fingers and a thumb and puts it in, and if you ask her how much she says, that much. She knows the oil is right by the sound it makes. She knows the dough is finished when it stops arguing with her.

So six years ago Nabil started standing in her kitchen with a small digital scale and a notebook, and he asks her to put the palmful onto the tray of the scale before it goes into the pot, and she rolls her eyes and does it, and he writes the number down.

He has sixty-one of them now. Sixty-one recipes, in a notebook with a rubber band round it, and they are not the kind you find in a book. He writes the weight, and then he writes what she said while she was doing it. The pan has to sound like rain. Wait until the onion goes the color of a date. Do not touch it for four minutes, whatever it looks like, four minutes.

He writes the month, because some of them only work with what is in the market in the spring. He writes who was there when she made it. Beside one of them there is a line that says: the first time she made this after the wedding.

It is, without any question, the most careful thing he has ever done in his life. His sisters tease him about it and every single one of them has asked him for a copy.

Three weeks ago he was at a house down the road where people had gathered and were telling, one at a time, about things God had done. Not dramatic things. Ordinary things, mostly. A man talked for two minutes about a week in the summer.

And when it came round the circle to Nabil, he said something warm and general about the goodness of God, and it was true, and he heard how it sat in the room, and the next person went.

He walked home the long way.

At the house he went to the shelf in the back room and got down the second notebook. He had bought it at the same time as the first one, in the same shop, on purpose, and he had known exactly what it was for.

Three pages have anything on them.

The first entry has a date on it from nine years ago and one line under the date, and the line reads: the call came. That is all it says. The call came.

He sat on the edge of the bed with the notebook open on his knee for a long time, and he could not remember which call. He is a man who can tell you the exact gram weight of the salt in a dish his mother made in a spring nine years ago, and he could not remember which call.

Remember is in the imperative

There is a verse that sits in the middle of Moses talking to a whole nation on the edge of the country they had been promised, and it is not a suggestion about being grateful.

And thou shalt remember all the way which the LORD thy God led thee these forty years in the wilderness.Deuteronomy 8:2

Thou shalt remember. It is a command, in the same grammatical mood as thou shalt not steal, and it is given to people who were about to walk into a good land and start being busy.

That tells you something God clearly knows about human beings. Forgetting is not a character flaw that only careless people have. It is what happens by default, to everybody, including a man who can reproduce his mother's cooking to the gram. Memory is not storage. It is a practice, and a practice that is never performed is a practice you do not have.

You are commanded to remember, which means you have been handed something to remember, and that is a far kinder sentence than it sounds. Scripture puts the command there precisely because God knew the ground would swallow it otherwise, and the Holy Spirit is the one who brings things back to remembrance, which is the exact job Jesus said He would come and do.

Look at what God put in His own record

Now the part that undoes the man on the edge of the bed, and I want to take it slowly.

Read on in that chapter and see what God itemizes when He recounts forty years. He humbled you. He let you be hungry and then fed you with manna, which nobody had ever heard of. He led you through a great and terrible wilderness. And then, twice in the same passage, this:

Thy raiment waxed not old upon thee, neither did thy foot swell, these forty years.

Clothes that did not wear out. Feet that did not swell.

That is what is in God's own written record of the most important stretch in the history of a nation. Not the sea. Not the mountain. Sandals and ankles, listed as things worth putting in writing, twice, forever.

Nobody at a gathering would tell that. It would not last two minutes in a circle. And God wrote it down and it is still in the book three thousand years later, and the sea got one chapter and the shoes got two mentions.

You have a life full of entries of exactly that size, and they were never disqualified for being small, and that is not encouragement I am offering you, it is what the written record of Israel actually consists of, and His Spirit is the one lifting your own sandals and ankles back into view while you read this.

Write it like a recipe

Here is the practical heart of it, and Nabil already knows how to do it. He has just never turned the skill on this.

Why can he reproduce a dish from a spring nine years ago? Because he wrote the weight. He wrote the month. He wrote what she said while her hands were moving. He wrote who was in the room. The entry has enough in it to survive its own author forgetting.

And why has the second notebook lost him? Because the entry says: the call came. Three words. Absolutely true when he wrote them, and worth nothing to him now, because he wrote it the way people write about God, briefly and reverently and without the salt weighed.

So write the other kind. What was the date. Who rang, or what arrived, or what stopped. What you had been asking. What you said out loud when it happened. What the room smelled like. The place where you stood. The thing that made you sit down.

If that feels like too much detail for something so ordinary, remember whose record has the sandals in it.

You have permission from the text itself to keep a small, plain, dated, unimpressive entry, and you are the keeper of that record and you were made one the day God started leading you, and Scripture is where the pattern comes from and His Spirit is what keeps it from being mere sentiment.