by Jen Hatmaker
How to begin? Oh heavenly mercies. There isn’t a template for this work, but I can tell you my early steps to forgiveness. God was super clear: Pray for this person every day, which was the meanest thing He ever said to me. I was furious. I think I even said something petulant to God like, “The hell I will!” and He was all, “Do it, Potty Mouth.” So my prayers started rather, well, shallow: Please don’t let this person get hit by a car today. Amen. That was as far as I could go. The anger around my heart was still stretched tight. I was obedient to the letter of the law only.
But as that practice went on, something started to happen. God loosened that old anger bit by bit, and the prayers gave way to deeper, more meaningful requests. Mind you, the increments were small and took more time than I wanted to give, but I started thinking of that person as the kid they once were, whose story I knew included loss and abandonment. God began showing me triggers I had ignited carelessly, tapping into lifelong wounds that set off a disproportional reaction. Prayer awakened enough humility to own my contribution to the free fall, a difficult admission. And would you believe after staying the course long enough, I developed a tenderness toward the person who hurt us, and it was sincere. Prayer didn’t heal the relationship, but it healed me.
God is still in the miracle business, and sometimes those miracles are in us.
While forgiveness might feel like abandoning justice, it actually sets us free. It liberates us from the crushing responsibility to oversee the resolution, which may or may not ever come. It removes any authority another person holds over our wholeness; it steals its power. Surprisingly, it can even bring us to the point where we wish our offender well, where we desire his or her peace too. It gently takes our minds and hearts and attention and brings them back to the present, to be with the ones who are here. Forgiveness gives us back our life and gives us back to our life. It is holy and hard work that says to God: Here is this sad thing. It is all Yours to fix or mend or redeem or simply bear witness. I am prying my hands off and freeing them up for other work.
We bury what we wanted and accept what we have.
But then, new life. Rising up from the grave, like tender little shoots. So small at first. So fragile. But forgiveness clears the way for new growth, even if the other person is completely unrepentant. We can still live. We can still be vibrant. We grow and develop and find beauty again, shoots of hope pushing up through the rubble. And soon enough, when we nurture grace and release instead of anger and resentment, a bloom, an unfolding of life again.
Two quick words: If the person who hurt you has a history of mainly healthy behavior, if they’ve been mostly safe, by all means, press not only into forgiveness but reconciliation. A broken relationship mended by forgiveness can be even stronger than it was before. Henri Nouwen wrote: “Forgiveness is the name of love practiced among people who love poorly. The hard truth is that all people love poorly. We need to forgive and be forgiven every day, every hour increasingly. That is the great work of love among the fellowship of the weak that is the human family.”2 Confrontations, difficult conversations, these are hard, I know. But better to prioritize a restored relationship than let it go down without a fight simply because we are conflict averse. Earth is indeed Forgiveness School.
Second, forgiveness comes easier to people who regularly ask forgiveness themselves. It is mature Christian practice to own our offenses and remain humble enough to apologize when we’ve wounded, intentionally or not. This posture makes a tender people, a safer family with softer edges. All of us love poorly at some point, and infusing our community with ownership and repentance is contagious. Say you’re sorry. Ask forgiveness. This leads not only to stronger relationships but to better humans, and this world needs better humans.
It is worth the work. Beth Moore wrote on Twitter: “God is raising you mighty and mighty doesn’t come pretty. Pay the price.” The cost of forgiveness is high but the payoff is higher: health, peace, wholeheartedness, grace. It goes on: resilience, maturity, compassion, depth. God raises us back up mighty in love, through the pain, through the mess, stronger than before. Forgiveness does not erase your past—a healed memory is not a deleted memory—but it does enlarge your future, increase your love, and set you free.
It’s worth it.
Wine is constant proof that God loves us and loves to see us happy.1
— BENJAMIN FRANKLIN
CHAPTER 19
POTATO AND KNIFE
My body completely behaved in my twenties. It delivered three babies like a boss, snapped back into shape no matter what the mouth fed the stomach, and it crossed the Thirty Threshold in a minuscule size six. What a mannerly body! What a champion! What a trooper! What an underappreciated star with a clear shelf life!
These days, the first number on the scale is the same but the second is the difference between a toddler and an independent reader, God bless us each and every one. My body’s history communicates an obvious possibility, a size I actually was even after being pregnant twenty-seven out of fifty-six months, but it can’t figure out how to get back there, or really even near there. After careful analysis, I think I’ve narrowed the problem down:
Food. And drinks.
All of them.
I love basically all the food and all the drinks.
I worship everything that no one eats anymore: dairy, gluten, carbs, wheat, sugar, red wine. These are my best friends. I want to marry gluten, and the rest of these beauties can be my bridesmaids. Chips and salsa can walk me down the aisle. My favorite food is a toasted sandwich with mayo (Duke’s, of course) and fresh tomato slices and melted Swiss and ham and bread-and-butter pickles. I cannot live without pizza, nor would I want to. Deep red wine and bruschetta and salty aged Gouda is my Camelot. A juicy burger on a soft homemade bun with blue cheese and caramelized onions alongside crispy Parmesan fries is my life force.
Sure, I could just not eat those, but I want to is the thing. I love them. Spicy flavors and melted ooziness and crunchy browned things and rich, fragrant sauces make me supremely, delightfully, viscerally happy. I want to cook them, share them, eat them, talk about them, write about them, gush over them, read about them, go bananas over them. I have no qualms discussing a brilliant dinner I am eating the whole time I am eating it. This is how I weed out friend candidates—if they cannot continue to rhapsodize after the first course, if they are unwilling to share bites, like a terrorist, we have no future.
Somehow for me, cooking ends up being greater than the sum of its parts. Alone, prepping veggies sounds tedious, scouring recipes takes too much planning, cooking for an hour after a workday seems like punishment. But altogether, the alchemy of the smells and sounds, the music playing and glass of peppery Cabernet nearby, the physical rhythm of chopping, stirring, and searing after a day of thinking, sitting, and typing turns into my favorite section of the day, when work fades and the family starts to gather near the kitchen because sizzling garlic and onion is an irresistible temptress. Cooking dinner is a sacred gateway from work to rest, from seven separate lives to one shared table.
And for the record before we go on, dinner is absolutely my day’s last hurrah. My mom is still chewing her last bite as she starts cleaning the kitchen. I think she has gone to bed with a dirty kitchen never. I, on the other hand, have no problem leaving mine a war zone. As long as the food is put up (I am a leftover evangelist), I can plop right down on the couch for my end-of-the-day Netflix prize and leave the mess until dawn. It’s my last gasp, the cooking. With the fed bellies and happy eaters and kids retiring to homework, I discover I am D.O.N.E. Thank you, Austin! That’s my show! You’ve been amazing! Consequently, my tank drops from half full to terrifyingly empty in five minutes, making the Bedtime Hour treacherous for all parties involved.
Related: I feel like a Catholic at confession, and I’m not sure how to say this without alienating my tribe and showing my cards, but as it turns out, I am a Morning Mom. I actually feel embarrassed about this. Like my brand of sarcasm and melodram
a requires crankiness in the a.m. It would be such good material. But nope. No, ma’ams. I am full of hope and promise in the morning. Good morning, lovies! Good morning, good morning, good mooooorning, it’s time to rise and shine! I am all cheek kisses and back rubs and gentle words and sunshine at dawn’s early light.
Brandon wakes up the kids like a drill sergeant at boot camp. Morning requires Discipline and No Whining and his little soldiers better hup to. He throws their lights on and refuses to coddle sleepy, warm teens and preteens. He is not having it. But I am having all of it. Your honor, I submit as evidence the fact that I still wake up all my children, though one of them is old enough to vote. Breakfast tacos, delicious smoothies, waffles and bacon, baked oatmeal; I cook breakfast every morning like an annoying Cream of Wheat ad. Here is some fresh salsa for your migas; here are sliced bananas for your pancakes. It is obnoxious. Does it help you still like me knowing that I have none of this energy past dinner and that I “pray with Remy” while she is in her bed and I am yelling a prayer to Christ our Lord from the living room?
For me, there is something deeply satisfying in feeding my people well. It helps that they mostly love yummy food and appreciate the work, but even then, it feels good, like I prioritized something important, something nourishing and healthy. Maybe it’s because I am not inherently nurturing; I lean no-nonsense. I don’t really coddle or fuss or hover or overprotect. I don’t like to play board games. I’m not sweet. I was always rubbish at Legos (“Mommy, all you build are towers”). I’m of the Buck Up, Buttercup crowd. So cooking real food with my hands that tastes good is my way of taking actual, physical care of my people. It is me saying: I love you, I care about you, I care for you. It is my offering.
We live in a small town adjacent to Austin, right off old-fashioned Main Street. It is as quaint and charming as you think, a movie set in real life. We walk to the little restaurants and coffee shop and library all the time, the train an ever-present soundtrack. At Cleveland’s, a restaurant in a 130-year-old building with original wide plank floors and a tin ceiling, I was swooning over their French fries, rustic and flavorful and irregular, when the waiter, not just a server but a foodie, said: “Just potato and knife. It’s enough.”
We’ve lost a little something in today’s microwave world, haven’t we? The best path to the perfect French fry has always been running a sharp knife through actual potatoes, dropping them in bubbling oil or baking in a searing oven, then sprinkling crunchy salt all over them while they are still hot. But somewhere along the way, potato and knife became processed, frozen fries—uniform, coated, tasteless, covered in ice shards. Food turned complicated and industrialized. It was once pretty basic: garden, tree, animal, plants. Now it is fat-free, high fructose corn syrup, flavor coated, dyed. It is prepackaged, quick and easy, freezer to table, no fuss.
And believe me, I understand the appeal of those words. If anything in my day can be quick and easy, I am here for it, and I’ll run through the Taco Bell drive-thru in a hot minute on days our family is the center attraction at the Freak Show Circus. However, we hand off much more than labor to the food industry, not the least of which is nutrition, but perhaps the greater loss is the beautiful farm-to-table system God devised down here. There is something noble about real food, the exchange between farmer and eater, the simple transformation of raw ingredients into breakfast, into dinner. There is also honor in the work, the cooking. It is old-fashioned, an homage to our mothers and grandmothers and all mothers and grandmothers in the history of time.
Here is the right place to affirm that cooking doesn’t have to be fancy or complicated or take two hours a night. The industrialized food industry nestled those lies deep within the ethos of their marketing strategy: cooking real food will be too hard for your busy life and skill set . . . we got this for you. But let me assure you that simple, homemade food does not require a culinary degree or half your evening. It is cheaper than processed, prepackaged stuff, and anyone can dice an onion, roast sweet potatoes, grill lamb burgers.
I’ve also learned that kids (and husbands, oh my gosh) will eventually start eating what you cook. If all we ever serve is frozen nuggets and canned corn, obviously they will buck curried fried rice. But if you start incorporating new flavors and new ingredients and new combinations bit by bit, if you slowly introduce sesame green beans or chopped salad or fish tacos and start seasoning your food with zingy flavors, you can indeed broaden your family’s palate. In my opinion, it is worth the aggravation this food odyssey will initially deliver by way of complaining, fussing, overreacting, and full-on lamenting (these poor people having to eat red peppers; THE HUMANITY).
Finally, before I give you a recipe so you, too, can outpace your twentysomething body (I am here for you), let me say this: I cook dinner around three days a week. This feels like a smashing victory. On the other days, we eat leftovers, takeout, random food, or FFY (Fend For Yourself). This bothers me zero percent. I have not batted 1,000 for any single category in the whole of my life. I love food, I love cooking, I love the entire thing, and I still manage less than half a week. So everyone be cool. Gather up all your chill and do the best you can, even if that means one day of homemade and six days of Count Chocula. If these children don’t like it, they can grow up and move out one day and make their own dinners, and may God bless them with kids who only eat processed cheese slices on white bread.
This is a great homemade recipe for your repertoire. I’m going to give you a winner, so your nonadventurous eaters won’t gripe, but you can still push the envelope just a smidge.
FRIED CHICKEN SLIDERS WITH HONEY DIJONNAISE
This is mostly homemade, partly not, but the one processed ingredient involves Hawaiian Rolls, and if we can’t make an exception for those, all of life is meaningless. You have almost all these ingredients already, so a one-bag trip to the store will have you in business.
Honey Dijonnaise Sauce
1 cup mayo
2 tablespoons Dijon mustard
2 tablespoons honey
Pinch of salt
Fried Chicken:
Peanut oil (about an inch in your skillet)
2 cups milk
1 tablespoon white wine vinegar
1 egg
1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon pepper
1 teaspoon cayenne
2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup panko bread crumbs
1 tablespoon each: salt, garlic powder, paprika
6 thin-cut chicken breasts, cut in half for 12 sliders (Or as many as you want to make. I literally make 20.)
Sliders:
1 package Hawaiian Slider Rolls, sliced in half lengthwise
1 (8-ounce) package Swiss cheese slices (or provolone, Colby-Jack, Cheddar, whatever)
1 pound bacon, cooked and cut in half
Lettuce
Sliced tomatoes
Make your Honey Dijonnaise: mix all the ingredients together in a small bowl. (There, you’re done). Stick it in the fridge.
Now fry your chicken: pour the oil into a large flat-bottomed skillet, and start heating on medium-high heat. (Your oil has to be super hot, or you get soggy, oil-drowned fried chicken, and your family will cry all the tears in North America.)
In a shallow baking dish, combine the milk, vinegar, and egg, and mix together. This basically becomes homemade buttermilk, because who buys actual buttermilk? I throw in some seasonings here, because a bit of salt and cayenne and black pepper ain’t never hurt nothin’. In a second shallow baking dish, mix the flour, panko, and seasonings.
Salt and pepper both sides of your chicken breast halves. With one hand, dip a breast into the milk mixture. Move it to the flour mixture, and toss with the other hand. (I am not trying to be difficult, good reader. Just keeping your fingers from becoming breaded.) Shake off the excess flour and place carefully into the hot oil. Fry four to five minutes on each side until Brown and Beautiful. Repeat with the rest of the chicken, but don’t crowd your pan. You will p
robably fry in two batches. Keep your first batch in a 200-degree oven on a pan lined with paper towels.
Build your Hawaiian sliders: bread, Honey Dijonnaise, fried chicken, cheese, bacon, lettuce, tomato, Honey Dijonnaise, bread.
Listen to what I’m saying to you: This is my family’s tip-top most requested meal. I am not even kidding. It’s just a fried chicken sandwich for the love of Truett Cathy, but the attention to flavor on each layer, plus the dreamy sweet slider rolls, inspired this dinner conversation the last time I made these:
Caleb: Raise your hand if you think these are better than Chick-fil-A.
[All hands up.]
I rest my case.
There is nothing else on this earth more to be prized than true friendship.1
— THOMAS AQUINAS
CHAPTER 20
FANGIRL
I’ve spoken often about our Supper Club, now in our fifth year of feeding one another once a month, devoted in between. There are four couples: two pastors, four authors, three business owners, three native Texans, one hipster who used to be a cowboy, one Jersey girl who used to be Goth, and sixteen kids between us. We rotate houses, the host cooks and cleans, and we never make it home before 1:00 a.m., which means SC is really two days: one for feasting and one for recovery.
In addition to all the work, the host comes up with a table discussion topic. Sometimes it is funny like, What was your most kickass moment as a kid, when you thought you were nailing life? (This resulted in me singing “Blue Jeans” for my compatriots, the award-winning song Christy Doucet and I sang in the sixth-grade talent show, which won first place. Stop asking me about it, you guys! You’re embarrassing me!) Topics are witty, silly, or incredibly poignant and precious. I cried into my charred shrimp and jalapeño Cheddar grits just two weeks ago at Aaron and Jamie’s, so dear was the conversation. Four years ago or so, one of the questions was this: