Cooking for a Table I Cannot Taste

The steam comes off the pot in one tall white column and breaks against the light over the stove, and she reads it now the way she used to read a smell.

Nine years ago she could have told you the stage of a meal from the hallway with her coat still on. Garlic going into hot oil is a sound and a scent and they arrive together. Rice at the exact minute before it has to come off the heat smells like warm paper, and she could catch that from two rooms away with an armful of laundry.

Then the illness. Six weeks of it and a long gray tail afterward, and when the rest of her came back the taste and the smell did not. The doctors called it by its name, and were kind, and promised her nothing, which she has since decided was the kindest thing anybody did. That was two winters ago. She has stopped counting in months.

Her family speaks food. That is not a figure of speech in this house. Nobody in it says the sentence about loving you out loud; they put the good piece on your plate and look away while you take it. Her mother-in-law's entire vocabulary is a covered dish carried up two flights of stairs. And she is the one who cooks.

So she cooks. She measures now where she used to pinch. There is a kitchen scale on the counter and a row of labeled jars above it and a notebook with timings written in her small square hand, and she tastes with the faces at the table instead: the boy's eyebrows going up, her husband's half second pause before he reaches again, her mother-in-law saying absolutely nothing, which in that house is the highest mark there is.

Tonight is a Friday and the pot is the big one, and the steam is coming up in that column, and she does the thing she does every single week. She leans in over the rising heat and breathes all the way down, deliberately, in case.

Nothing. Warm nothing. Clean, faithful, ordinary nothing.

She straightens up and stirs and does not cry, because there is a meal in forty minutes and eleven people coming. And the sentence she cannot say out loud to anybody at that table is this one: I am feeding people something I will never know the taste of, and I do not have a name for what that is, and everyone I love keeps telling me God is going to hand it back.

You know that pot. You have your own kitchen and your own version of the sentence you cannot say, and your own arithmetic that will not let you nod along when the kind ones say the kind thing. You are the one still carrying the meal to the people you love, and it is written in Psalm 34:8 that the invitation is to taste and see that the Lord is good, and the Holy Spirit has never once withdrawn that invitation from a mouth that stopped reporting. Stay with me, because restored and replaced are two different words, and that is the whole of what is coming.

Taste and see, spoken over a mouth that has gone quiet

Let me say the honest part first, because a great many kind sentences get built on top of a thing nobody will say plainly. Some senses do not come back. Not because the God who thought up a nose is short of power, and not because anybody failed to want it hard enough. Nobody here is putting that on you, and nobody here is handing you a date either.

Now look at the line this whole message stands on, and at who was holding the pen.

O taste and see that the LORD is good: blessed is the man that trusteth in him.Psalm 34:8

David wrote it with the dust of a foreign court still on his sandals. He had walked into Gath with nothing, played the madman at the gate to get back out alive, and come away into a cave, and the people who found him there were in trouble, in debt, and bitter of soul. That is the room the invitation was first spoken in. Not a banquet hall. A cave with four hundred desperate men in it and nothing worth naming on the fire.

So notice what the line asks. It does not say, be told that the Lord is good, or be persuaded of it, or take a report from somebody who has had an easier decade than you. It says: try Him, and find out for yourself. The invitation is aimed at the part of a person that settles what is real by contact rather than by hearsay, and David reached for the most bodily word he owned, because contact is the whole point.

Your tongue is not that part of you. It never was. A tongue is a wonderful instrument and it is not the organ that tastes God, and the man holding the pen knew it, because he wrote the line hungry.

You are invited to taste and see in Psalm 34:8, and that invitation was never once routed through your sense of smell, and the Holy Spirit is the one carrying it to you tonight, at the stove, in the steam, exactly as you are. I am not softening anything to say it. The verse is older than your illness, it was written by a man with nothing on the fire, and it still reads the same.

Restored is not the same word as replaced

Now the second thing, and it is for the people at your table as much as it is for you.

The ones who keep saying God is going to give it back are not liars and they are not fools. They are reaching for something entirely true about Him, that He restores, with the only picture anybody ever handed them, which is the thing coming back in the box it left in. Do not let anybody mock them for that, and I am not going to. Their instinct is right. Their picture is the wrong size.

Because in the Book, restoring almost never means handing over a copy. In the psalm everybody knows, the object of the verb is the soul. He restores my soul. Not my inventory, not my census of what is missing. The soul, which is the whole living self of a person, the me that is standing over the pot doing the wanting and the working and the not crying.

Think of a house in an old quarter after the ground has moved. Restoring it does not mean the crack never ran up the wall. It means the stone gets re-set and the courtyard is put back plumb and the door swings true again, and people eat under that roof for another eighty years. The house is not new. It is standing, it is the same house, and it is holding weight.

That is what He does with a person. Replaced would mean the sense handed back and the two winters quietly erased. Restored means the woman at the stove put back into working order around a loss that stays a loss, able to hold weight again, able to love out loud in a language she now has to spell instead of hear.

You have a God who restores you and does not hand you a copy, and the difference between those two is the whole mercy. His word puts restore beside lead and beside a table prepared, all of them about what happens to the person and not one of them about the inventory, and it is the Holy Spirit doing every part of that in you, slowly and truly, while the kind sentence keeps pointing at the box.