Twelve Pages Of The Recipe Book Are Filled In

Twelve pages.

You know the number because you counted it, and you have counted it more than once, and counting it is part of what has kept the book shut.

It was a good idea and it still is. Write them out. The one your grandmother made at Christmas that nobody has ever got right since. The soup. The thing you do to chicken that your daughters will one day want and will not be able to ask you for. Write them out by hand, in a real book, so it exists.

You did twelve of them. Some of them have a line at the bottom about who used to make it. One of them has a smudge where something dripped, which honestly improves it.

And then you stopped somewhere around the fourth week.

There was no decision. There was a week where everything went sideways, and the book was on the counter and then it was in a drawer, and now when you see it, you do not see twelve pages done. You see all the recipes that are not in it, and behind those, a small unpleasant thought that you are the kind of woman who has good ideas and does not carry them through.

I want to get in the way of that thought before it gets any further.

Twelve recipes exist in your handwriting that did not exist before. That is not a stalled project. That is twelve recipes. If something happened to you tomorrow, your daughters would have twelve of them, in your hand, with the smudge.

Write it plain, and make it legible

There is a moment in Habakkuk where a prophet is complaining, loudly, and God answers him with something oddly practical.

Habakkuk has been asking hard questions. He has been standing on a watchtower waiting for an answer he half expects not to like. And when the answer comes, it does not start with theology. It starts with a writing instruction.

And the LORD answered me, and said, Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. (Habakkuk 2:2, King James Version)

Write it. Make it plain. So that whoever reads it can move.

Not make it beautiful. Not make it complete. Plain, and readable, and useful to somebody going past at speed.

You are doing exactly what God told a prophet to do, and Habakkuk 2:2 is the sentence that says a written thing is for the person running past it. The Holy Spirit is the one who takes an instruction given on a watchtower and sets it down in a kitchen drawer in your house.

And look at what the writing is for. That he may run that readeth it. The point of the writing is not the book. The point is somebody else, later, moving because it was there.

You have written twelve pages for somebody who is not born yet, and it is already settled that Scripture calls that plain and useful rather than incomplete. His Spirit is the one who reads a smudged page the way heaven reads it.

Twelve is not a fraction

Here is where the counting has been lying to you.

Your mind holds twelve up against a total. Fifty recipes, sixty, whatever the imaginary complete book contains. And against that total, twelve is a fifth, and a fifth is failure with extra steps.

But there is no total. Nobody set the number. There is no complete recipe book anywhere on this earth, because families keep eating, and somebody is always inventing something out of what was in the freezer.

The book was never a project with an end. It was a way of putting your hand on paper, and the page count is not a measure of the woman holding the pen.

You were never behind on this, and no number was ever set for you to be behind against. Habakkuk 2:2 asks for it to be written and plain, and never once mentions how much of it, and the Spirit of God is the one who takes an imaginary total out of a woman's hands.

And I want to say the other thing, because I suspect it is in there too. You have been waiting to be in the right frame of mind. Calm week. Clean kitchen. Good pen. A day where you would do it properly and not rush it.

You are able to write one recipe on a bad evening, and heaven has never once required the right frame of mind first. The written word gives the instruction to a man mid complaint on a watchtower in Habakkuk 2:2, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is perfectly comfortable in a rushed kitchen.

Twenty minutes, and one recipe

So here is the ask.

Get the book out tonight. Open it to page thirteen. Write one recipe.

Not the hardest one. Not the one that most deserves to be preserved. Whichever one is nearest the front of your mind, even if it is something ordinary that nobody would call a family recipe. The way you do potatoes counts.

Write it in your normal handwriting at your normal speed. Do not draft it first on paper and copy it over neatly, because that is how twenty minutes becomes two hours and then never happens again.

If you get the quantities wrong, leave them wrong. If you forget a step and have to squeeze it in at the bottom with an arrow, squeeze it in with an arrow. An arrow is not a fault. An arrow is your hand.

You are covered while you write it badly, and Habakkuk 2:2 asked for plain rather than for beautiful. It is written that the vision was to be made plain so a runner could read it, and the Spirit of God is the one who is in a kitchen at half past eight with a pen.