I love cooking. It is truly a passion of mine. It calms me. I can take a handful of ingredients and create delicious meals for my husband, myself, and anyone else that happens to be at our house. I find joy in it, and do admit to taking a little pride in it.
Until there is something that I have no clue how to make and there is no recipe. Then I full on panic. Because in cooking, (unlike baking), there are lots and lots of rules that you can bend and break. But you have to know them before you can break them. And you have to know them to know which ones you can't break. For example: ever cook needs to know that chicken is fully cooked at 165 degrees Fahrenheit. You can't break that rule, you can't bend it. Raw chicken is dangerous, even deadly.
Casseroles on the other hand simply need a balance of ingredients, but can be manipulated to be made into almost anything. My chicken pot pie recipe is closer to a curry than anything else.
Cooking is a lot like life that way. There are certain rules you just shouldn't break - don't randomly kill people. And there are certain rules you can bend - if you're going to kill people, please follow Dexter's example. (Joke, please for all the tea in China, remember it's a joke.)
I was okay at life in Iowa, but part of me was deeply unsatisfied. Even bending the rules enough to get by, or breaking a lot of them to try and make life make more sense wasn't really working. I was missing community - not Miss Erica or Marlise or my mom - they were great - but the kind that isn't just made up of people you love. I disagreed with a solid half of what came out of people's mouths on Sunday during Sunday school, and I loved every second of it. Not because I wanted to argue with them, rather the opposite, I kept my mouth shut. But because it felt like home.
Home is a place where you aren't always right and not everyone cares about your opinion, let alone your opinion all of the time and yet that is what I kept asking from church. I was right - clearly - and someone needed to damn well start acting like it. Don't get me wrong, my problem with churches in Iowa goes much deeper (senior pastors gossiping in the name of love while making false accusations that have no proof more than a failed popularity contest) but part of it was also my problem.
I need to sit down and listen to other people. Even when I disagree with them. Some of them are older than me, and they're not idiots, they think like they do for a reason. I can't just dismiss them. They're my family now. As is Anthem. I don't agree with everything he thinks about life or the world but I do respect him enough to take him seriously and think about what he says. Just like I need to respect others that I don't know as well as I know Anthem.
I'm still a rule breaker - like I said, I love to cook and that's not exactly normal here and I will find my chicken! but - but I don't want to do this on my own anymore. I'm not the smartest, wisest, or most intuitive person I know. And that's okay. That's why God gives us age, to allow us to get wiser. And now I'm going to start listening to the wisdom of others - even if I don't agree with all of it at first.
Because rule breaking and bending can make awesome curry dishes out of pot pies. But following the wisdom of those who have gone before us can also lead to amazing apple pies. There's room for both in the kitchen, and there's room for both in life.
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