Recipe Cards

I remember very clearly my first cooking adventures. I think the first one was some kind of chocolate disaster as it required melting the chocolate with the butter and I skipped this step in the recipe because a) I didn't read it and b) it seemed so unnecessary. I can't remember if, in this particular venture, I was rescued by my mother or if it ended up in the trash can.

My second major cooking attempt I remember very clearly because I followed every step of the instruction on the card. It was pudding of some kind and it required a quarter or a teaspoon of salt, but I thought it said a quarter of a cup of salt and we didn't have enough in the container with the girl and her umbrella so I had to take it out of the shakers. This we just threw away.

I was fortunate enough to go to school in the days when we were required to take cooking and sewing. I managed to learn enough to be dangerous at both. I have fond memories of the wonderful parfaits we made one day, required no cooking and had rice crispies, strawberries and vanilla pudding. Yummy. And the chocolate dipped peanut butter balls which I left in my locker over Christmas and was too scared to eat anyway since we put wax in the chocolate and I found that way too gross. Less warm fuzzies about sewing class though I do remember a trip to the optometrist when the sewing needle snapped, flying into my eye and scratching the cornea. Ouch. I did find the patch to be quite attractive and since I was already blind as a bat, it did no permanent damage. But I digress seriously.

It's the recipe cards that are currently on my mind. I remember very well learning to read them and then getting excited about reading cookbooks and finding ways to cook things in new and improved manners. Once I got better at reading a recipe and figuring out what kind of ingredients went well together I began to find the art of substitution fascinating. I had a friend named Teresa who used to say you could only substitute so many ingredients before a recipe stopped being that recipe anymore and started being something else entirely. I think my stuff often becomes something else entirely. I think sometimes this is a good thing, but not always. Sometimes it is a freak of nature and should be illegal.

Here is what I am thinking. I have been studying and studying and studying discipleship. I have read books about books about books and I am not complaining. They are all good. I will go on reading them and learning something new. I want to do that not only for knowledge sake, but I am finding that the further you expand your vocabulary, the more opportunity you have to express a thought, a feeling or an concept. Giving me words has been like opening the doorway to expression and given me tremendous freedom. I am excited and I want more! I want to talk to people who do this well and I want to ask questions and listen to thought that help me define what it is I believe. It is very much like the discovery in cooking that the reading part is in itself fun.

However, no matter how much I read cookbooks, I am not satisfied stopping there. I need to make it, I need to taste it and I need to serve it to someone. That's the practical application part. I am aware there are those who just read cookbooks, edit them or just find them entertaining. I want to eat. It just makes sense to me, read, find something that sounds appealing and then make it. If it turns out to not taste appealing, do not repeat. If it does, it may become a staple. This is satisfaction to me. It is as essential.

Why then do we have this major disconnect between reading and doing when it comes to discipleship? Why when the same people who have written these books are asked for procedures, they have nothing to fall back on but, you have to figure that out yourself. Did anyone ever pick up a cookbook that just listed the ingredients, told you what you ought to end up with if you used them all correctly and then said, now you figure out how to do it? I don't think so. I don't want that cookbook. I will tell you right now, the girl who couldn't figure out the difference between teaspoon and cup at 10 isn't that much further along now. The end of that process is just going to be landfill.

So, here is what I want us to do. I want us to take all the ingredients in discipleship and I want us to begin to construct some recipe cards. Some step by step procedures to end up with a disciple at the end. Each recipe might need a little substitution, to adjust for location and starting ingredients and maybe elevation, but at least some clue about how to start and what the end result should look like. How hard can this be?

And maybe we could have a disciple off. Top prize, an enormous crown to lay at Jesus' feet. Submit your entries today!