An Evening Blessing for Your Kitchen

My kitchen has a rhythm to it.  Some days are baking days, some are cooking days.  Some are rest days.  Every evening, I look ahead to the next day and begin the preparations - the soaking, or feeding my sourdough starter, or refreshing my kombucha, tending my broth, or preparing my yogurt.

Those of us who cook real food, find ourselves working in the kitchen. We believe in food, and that the preparations of real food is good work, valuable work for us and for those we feed.  We are willing to put in the hours, and soon this becomes natural and normal.  But it is work. 

Sometimes I get to end of a day, even a lovely day in which we have had lots of giggles, played hard, cooked hard, read books and had bubble baths and everyone is tucked into bed and I have finally finished cleaning up and preparing for the next day, I look at the kitchen and think:  tomorrow I have to do this all over again.  Or I count all of the tasts that I didn't accomplish, ignoring the ones that I did. 

To work is human.  To dread work, or to overwork is more human. 

But to work, to create out of the gifts that you have, and then to stop, and recognize the work that you have done and to call it good -- that is divine. 

That is the holy rhythm for work, set out for us in the very beginning, when God made the heavens and earth.  I love to read Genesis One, and to hear about how God imagined and then created each segment of the world.  Here, God is the actor, He is the creator and we are the art that He works to create.  He also works rhythmically, working on one area every day.  I see Him as a steady Gardener, knowing not to try to attempt it all in one day, but setting forth one goal a day and tending to it, and then at the end, He stops. He surveys. He declares:  It  . . . is . . . good. 

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. And there was evening, and there was morning—the sixth day.   Genesis 1:31


Can I learn to do this?  To stop at the end of the day, fold my dishtowel and survey my kitchen, no matter what is still left undone and bless it: It is good. 

I think that, put together, this becomes a holy dance, a kind of worship.  First work, creating as much goodness as you can in the time that you have.  Then finish, stop.  Recognize when you have reached the end.  Then see - name - remember -  the meals you served, the tummies you fed.  Then bless, in the name of the Father, speaking His words:  It is good.  

 

 

Shared at Simple Lives Thursday, Thank Your Body Thursday, Fight Back Friday, Tasty Traditions, Fresh Bites Friday, Traditional Tuesdays, Fat Tuesday, Party Wave Wednesday and Real Food Wednesday .