rightly considered

I am tempted to begin this saga with a reference to the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie, but perhaps Chesterton put it more eloquently (if no less truly) when he wrote: “An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

The greater part of this particular afternoon seemed everything but an adventure.

I was on my way to bake cookies with a Chinese friend I’d met about a year ago. She moved to the States with her husband just as I was returning to school for my senior year, and we’d met several times to yak and eat and laugh; to talk about different cultures, a shared faith, and her baby on the way. She had treated me to delicious Chinese food on more than one occasion, and I’d made some assortment of baked goods. She asked if I could teach her to bake, said she had flour and sugar, and we set a date.

So here I was, on a Sunday afternoon, picking her up from Chinese church. A twenty-minute drive—no big problem, and soon we were chatting away the twenty-more minutes to her house.

Oh dear, the key. Apparently it had been left with her husband back at the church. But there is a friend close by, one she’d brought to Easter service a few months before, and we could use her kitchen. Said friend did not answer the phone.

We set out on foot to the store for a baking pan, hoping that by the time we return her husband will surely be back from church so we could start work in the kitchen. We walk, we talk, and then another phone call, completely unintelligible to my American ears. Her husband will not return for more than an hour.

But there is another friend. We walk back to the car and stop at the store on the corner for a cookie sheet. I check that her friend had eggs at least, the one thing (or so I thought) that I hadn’t brought in my brown paper bags patiently waiting in the back of the car. A bottle of water tremendously helps morale since I’d somehow neglected to drink water all day (insert FL heat).

Back in the car, we drive the twenty minutes to her friend’s house (at this point, I’ve logged an hour on the road, and I start to sense a pattern).

We arrive. Her friend is welcoming, her home lovely and filled with light, tile floors that remind me of home, and all the bare open space that comes from a move just a week earlier.

Setting to work at last, the bowls and vanilla and salt and things spread themselves out over the counters; I begin to feel at home and very much more at ease. This is something I know about, something familiar. I can handle the kitchen.

But wait. Oh yes, the baking soda. Of course I had forgotten something. Did her friend have any? Here the cultural divide appears—what is baking soda? Baking powder? Cinnamon?

What could possibly happen at this point? The optimism starts to kick in—surely there is something in this kitchen we could use. This girl is all about substitutes and making do with creative solutions. The cell data on my phone predictably quits working for about five minutes (insert finger drumming on counter), and when it starts up again, it quickly becomes evident that baking powder is the only other alternative.

At this point, the entire thing appears laughable. So I laugh. Really, it was the only right thing to do.

We pile in the car again—my friend, her friend, and I—after appropriately discussing all possible options, of course—and drive to Wal-Mart (a merciful five minutes away this time) for baking soda.

I laughed again a little while later, because if one does not bake, one does not have a Cuisinart mixer either, and that means using the hands—not just for the chocolate chips bit at the end, but from square one: butter and sugar, and eggs and vanilla. Now I’m a kinesthetic person to the core, and I enjoy few things more than digging my hands into whatever is going on in the kitchen. Naturally, I offered the coveted occupation to my friend, while I measured things into the bowl and explained the process as I went.

I soon realized that not all people share my love for everything hands-on when my sweet Chinese friend laughed a little nervously and commented that things were rather messy. I suppose the situation was not unlike the pastor in Cambodia gleefully offering our party silkworms—you’ll love them!! I had enjoyed the silkworms, but the same could not be said for my friend when I offered her the position of mixing the sticky combination of raw egg, mushy clumps of butter and sugar, and thick flour with. . . baking soda.

The cookies went in the oven, and we started some fruit crisp; always a favorite, and so easy.

My friend had told me that the woman so generously hosting this cooking escapade in her kitchen wasn’t a believer. Amid the measuring of flour and missing ingredients and everything else about that ridiculous afternoon, it was on my mind that here was I, who knew the love of Christ, alongside this woman who didn’t. Several sentences from Lewis’ sermon Weight of Glory have stayed with me and burned in my mind ever since I first read them four years ago:

“There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilizations - these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.”

So I looked for an opportunity. She asked where I went to school, and well, duh—Bible College is the perfect opening to share the gospel! Me be like “Yeah, I’m a theology student, please allow me to hit you over the head with the Bible.” Tactfulness nil. So I did not take that course.

When I mentioned Reformation Bible College, my friend commented that a number of people from her church attended another Bible school nearby. Interesting. Likely no close connection, for Bible schools abound, and not all live up to the name. Curious though, and I ask: Reformed Theological Seminary, as it turns out—whose library is overrun by my classmates and I during the paper-writing weeks of our semester (a much-beloved season, let me assure you). I was not a little excited at this discovery, and encouraged by its implications for my friend, who’d become a Christian in China and moved across the sea to this country of a billion-and-one churches, few of which offer the true food of the Word on a Sunday morning.

A short while later, warm cookies in hand and mouth, we started discussing names. Most cultures take more interest in the significance of names than we in the United States, and both these women had lovely ones. Mine? It’s Hebrew, the female equivalent of Simeon, my God hears. Did they know the story of the old man in the temple? All of a sudden I realized what was happening. How he awaited the fulfillment of God’s promise all his long life? How Jesus’ parents brought him as a baby into the temple, and this old man held the Saviour who God had promised would deliver His people from their sins and the curse of Adam? How that baby grew up as the God-Man and died on the cross that we might be reconciled to God?

They were fascinated. I kept it short, but I had a spellbound audience of two women for the time it took to tell a story.

One woman heard the gospel that day—all because a key was forgotten and someone else didn’t answer their phone. A seed was planted, and it will be unwatched, unmonitored by all but One who ordained every end from the beginning of all things.

I’m at the opposite end of the country now, but I’ll never forget that hot, complicated day when everything went wrong; when I taught someone how to bake chocolate chip cookies, heard a brand new Zither instrument being played by a young Chinese woman living in my country, and explained how a simple Hebrew word pointed to the hope of our cursed race.

Because my God hears the cries of His people.