Better Than Alright

Cooking has long been a passion of mine.  I suppose it started with me helping my great-grandmother in the kitchen.  Although, I really don’t know how much help I was.  She didn’t use measuring cups, but she’d let me throw in the flour when she was making biscuits.  All the ingredients were mixed by hand.  No fancy mixer.  And her biscuits were always delicious.

My grandmother inherited her mother’s savvy in the kitchen.  I have always looked forward to meals cooked by her.  She was patient with me and answered my questions.  I always had a ton of them.  I wanted to bottle her methods.  She also inherited her mother’s techniques of measuring ingredients.  I was supposed to add ingredients until it looked “right.”  Can you understand why I had so many questions?  LOL.  The summer that she helped me pat out and season hamburgers and cook them in the skillet was EVERYTHING!  No one could tell me anything.  I was on my way to becoming a top chef.

I was so into my love for cooking that I decided that I needed professional help.  I was a teenager at this point.  The closest professional help within my budget was home economics at school.  I was all in.  But the crazy thing about home ec was that my teacher did not use the methods that my family used.  We followed recipes.  Like, we used measuring cups AND measuring spoons.  Hmmmm…..

The food tasted alright.  It wasn’t spectacular.  It wasn’t bad.  Just alright.  In class, I was the model student.  I stayed on task.  I followed the recipes as printed.  I would then recreate the recipes at home.  At first, I followed the recipes.  And then…..my genes took over.  I would add a pinch of this or a dash of that.  Before you knew it, the recipes became my own.  I had arrived at the stage of my life where I added until it looked “right.”

As Christians, we are called to be Christ-like.  While there are definitely standards that we should uphold, I don’t believe that means that we have to be robotic in our lives.  We don’t have to be so rigid.  God is creative and innovative.  He is dynamic.  Sometimes, we get caught up in being just alright and not spectacular.  We don’t want to stand out or be too flavorful.

But if we think about it, nobody raves about food that’s just alright.  When we accept who we are in Christ, we become better than alright.  We become appetizing to those that are still in the world.  They want to know what is going on in our lives that makes us so appealing.  It took time for me to get into the groove. To discover who I truly am in Christ.  To embrace the spice that He added to me to get me just “right.”  #wepreach