She Still Cooks Like She Is Home

Every Sunday, Marlene cooks for about nine people.

There are two people in the house. Her and her son, who is twenty-two and eats an enormous amount and still cannot get through it.

She has done this since 1998. She came over at nineteen. She has been here twenty-seven years, which is longer than she was there, and she has a job and a mortgage and a church and a hairdresser she has been going to for eleven years, and by every ordinary measure this is her home.

On Sunday she cooks the way her mother cooked, which is for whoever turns up, which in that house was always somewhere between eight and fourteen people, and the pot was on from about eleven and people came through until dark.

Nobody comes through. Her son's friends sometimes. Her neighbor twice a year. She freezes an unbelievable amount of food.

She is aware that this is not rational. She has said so herself, out loud, with a laugh, to about four people, always in the same joking way that closes the subject.

Here is the day it caught.

Her son, twenty-two and not tactful, looked at the pot on the stove on a Sunday in June and said, "Mom, who is all this for?"

And Marlene said, "There is nothing wrong with having enough."

And he said, "That's not what I asked," and went to his room, and was not being unkind, and had asked exactly the right question.

You know that. A thing you do every week, at cost, for a life that is a long way away or a long time ago, and somebody asks you about it and you produce a sentence that sounds like an answer and is not.

Three losses, named separately

Let me put down what I am not doing tonight, so you can stop bracing.

I am not going to tell you to cook less. I am not going to tell you to go back, or to stop calling home, or to feel more settled than you feel. And I am not going to tell you twenty-seven years is long enough for anything, because that is a thing people say who have never left anywhere.

What I will do is read you the first sentence God says to Abram, and count what is in it.

Now the LORD had said unto Abram, Get thee out of thy country, and from thy kindred, and from thy father's house, unto a land that I will shew thee.Genesis 12:1

Three things. Country. Kindred. Father's house.

God does not say leave home, as one item. He names three, and they are three because they come off separately and they hurt separately.

Country is the land, the weather, the food, the way people talk in the street. Kindred is the wider people, the cousins, the ones at the funerals. Father's house is the actual room with the actual table in it.

You did not lose one thing when you left, and Scripture itemizes it into three because that is what it actually costs. Genesis 12:1 names them separately rather than as a single word, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries that off the page and into a kitchen with a pot on for nine people.

And then the last clause. Unto a land that I will shew thee. Not a land I have shown you. Future tense. He left before he was told where. The showing came later and in pieces, and the man walked for years knowing only that he had been called out.

You have been walking toward something being shown rather than something described in advance, and that is the shape of the call rather than a failure of information. It is written that the land would be shown to him afterward, and the Holy Spirit is what makes an unfinished showing something a person can live inside.

The pot is not foolishness

Now let me be careful here, because this is where somebody gets hurt.

Marlene's Sunday pot is not a failure to settle. It is not her refusing to accept where she lives. Twenty-seven years of a mortgage and a job and a church is not a woman who has not accepted anything.

The pot is a practice. It is her mother's practice, done in a kitchen six thousand miles from her mother's kitchen, and it is one of the very few things she has that is entirely, unmistakably from there and not from here.

You are keeping something rather than refusing something, and Scripture never once asks a person to burn what they came with. Genesis 12:1 has God call Abram out without instructing him to forget the country he came from, and the Holy Spirit is what keeps a practice from being read as a refusal.

You have been carrying a whole country in a Sunday routine, and Scripture treats that as faithfulness rather than as a failure to arrive. Genesis 12:1 names the country first among the three, and the Holy Spirit is the one who gives a practice its proper weight.

And here is what I do want to name, because it is the part that is costing. It is not the food. It is the sentence: there is nothing wrong with having enough.

That sentence is a door being closed. Marlene has used it, or one like it, every single time anybody has asked in twenty-seven years, and the effect of it is that not one person in this country knows what her Sunday actually is.

She has kept the practice and lost the meaning of it, because the meaning would have to be said out loud to somebody and it never has been.

You are allowed to say what the practice is for, and there is nothing in Scripture that makes a person's grief for a place a private matter. Psalm 137:1 has an entire nation saying out loud that they sat down and wept when they remembered Zion, and the Holy Spirit is what makes a homesickness sayable rather than embarrassing.

Say this here rather than at the end, because I would rather say it and not be needed. If twenty-seven years of Sundays has gone somewhere heavier than lonely, or if the freezer full of food has started to feel like a comment on your life, do not sit with that alone. Tell somebody this week. Your son, a friend from church, your doctor, a counselor, or the 988 crisis line if you live in the United States. That is not me telling you a thing about your family back home. That is me refusing to leave you at that stove by yourself.