The Kitchen That Argued Better

The kitchen was small enough that two people could not both open the fridge.

Yellow walls that had been white once. A radio on the windowsill, always on, always the same station, always too quiet to actually listen to. And on the stove from about four in the afternoon, the pot.

He was nine years old, sitting at the table doing homework he was not doing, and his abuela was moving between the counter and the stove the way she did, which was constantly and without hurrying. Garlic in the pan. That sound. Then the onion and the pepper, and the whole apartment turning into that smell in under a minute, the smell that meant everything was fine.

And when she added the last of it to the pot she said something over it. She always did. Not a performance. Four or five words, half under her breath, one hand on the handle, and then she put the lid on and turned the radio up half a turn and asked him whether he had finished the page.

Twenty-eight years later he has a degree and most of a second one.

He can hold his own on any of it. He has read the people who make the case and the people who take it apart, and he is honest enough to admit that on a Tuesday afternoon in a seminar room the case does not always look as strong as he would like it to.

And here is what he has never said to anybody, because it sounds ridiculous.

The strongest evidence he has ever had that God is real is a kitchen with yellow walls, a pot, and an old woman saying five words over it with her hand on the handle.

He cooks it himself now, badly. Every time he does, the whole thing comes back so hard it takes his breath.

And every time, somewhere underneath, is the thought he keeps stepping on: that is not an argument. That is nostalgia. You are a grown man who has been reduced to using a smell as a proof.

God did not send a syllabus into the world

Let me stand up for the four years first, because I am not going to trade one against the other.

The study was worth doing. Careful thinking about God is an act of love and always has been, and the people who taught you to weigh a claim honestly gave you something you will use for the rest of your life. Nobody here is telling you to throw the books out the window.

But hear this, and take it finished rather than kindly: you are not a grown man who has been reduced to a smell. You have not fallen back on something childish because the real thing was too hard for you. That is not my sentiment about your abuela, it is what stands written into the opening of John's gospel, where the Word does not arrive as a treatise but as a body you could look at, and the same Holy Spirit who overshadowed that arrival is the one who has kept a small kitchen alive in you for twenty-eight years.

Read what John actually says happened, and notice which verb he reaches for.

And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld His glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.John 1:14

We beheld. Not we deduced. Not we concluded. They looked at Him, and they ate with Him, and one of them leaned on Him at a table, and that is what the man writing it puts forward as his evidence.

So the highest thing God ever did in this world He did in a way that came in through the senses. This is yours to keep, right now and not once you have found a footnote for it: your senses are not the cheap seats. Scripture puts the glory of God in front of eyes and hands, and the Spirit of God is the one who makes what the senses carry go all the way down.

Now let me name the accusation, because it needs answering rather than soothing.

You call it nostalgia. Nostalgia is longing for a time. This is not that. You are not homesick for 1997. What comes back when you cook it is not a year, it is a claim: that the world is held, that somebody was watching the pot, that a few words said over a meal by a woman with one hand on the handle were words said to Someone who was there.

That is not sentiment about the past. That is a theology, learned young, through the nose and the ears, before you had the vocabulary to state it. The written word says train up a child in the way he should go, and the Holy Spirit did that training over a stove without one line of it being explained to you.

And you have been carrying it faithfully ever since, which is why you cook it badly and cannot stop. The written word says His mercies are new every morning, and the Spirit does not care whether a truth reached you through a lecture or a lid going on a pot.