Mashed Potatoes

Cameron called from L.A. this past Saturday afternoon asking for my recipe for mashed potatoes. He wanted to make dinner for his girlfriend. It never occurred to me in all the years I thought I was just making dinner that someone was paying attention. Maybe that’s the way parenting happens.

We think we’re just doing the laundry, or paying the bills, or mowing the lawn, or arguing with our wife (or husband, as it may be), or complaining about how things went at the office when we think the kids can’t hear, or, if we are fortunate, reading the Bible and saying our prayers at day’s end no matter how crappy the day. All the while, we’re showing the best students we’ll ever have the recipes for managing life, taking care of business, maneuvering the mundane, dealing with success and failure as well as the give-and-take disappointments of daily life, not to mention how to handle conflict and respond to impossible people.

Most often, our kids just go on down the road, concocting the family recipes for all of the above from blind memory. It’s not until they get married and start having their own children that we begin to recognize the recipes on the plates they set before us at family gatherings. Only rarely do they ever call, from 2,000 miles and two time zones away, to ask us the exact recipe.

Of course, part of me is honored. I make dang good mashed potatoes if I say so. The trick, aside from proper proportions of salt, pepper and butter and from not cooking the potatoes too long so that they become mush instead of mash, is found in warming the butter before the mashing starts. Putting cold butter on hot potatoes cools them off too much before you serve them. Salt and butter to taste all you want, just don’t serve mashed potatoes cold. Hot mashed anything tastes better than cold potatoes. (I won’t even mention the unpardonable sin of instant potatoes.)

What honors me, humbles and scares me all at the same time is in knowing that, deep in his soul, Cameron has other recipes. Most of those he’ll make from memory, without even thinking, much less calling for directions.

That’s where faith comes in. Train up a child in the way he should go . . . we are promised (Proverbs 22:6), and in the long run, the recipe will pay off. I trust that word. That, though some of my life is a recipe for disaster, there was a bigger part of it that had something to do with calling on Jesus when I didn’t know how to handle the mix of ingredients life handed me. Cameron saw me pray, heard me pray, even heard me cry as I prayed and saw me cry, too, when the music touched me deep in my soul and heard and saw me laugh at life’s stupidities. He also saw me sing in church, stay awake during the sermon and even heard me brag when George Mason knocked one out of the park, which he did virtually every single time I heard him preach. How in the heck does he do that? What’s the recipe?

Anyway, Cam called. He wanted to make dinner in his cramped apartment for the girl that is the center of his world right now. I guess you could say that I was the unseen guest at the table. Isn’t the One who knows the best recipes always the uninvited guest, no matter what the recipe?

Thanks be to God!