I don’t think I was tall enough to even reach the stovetop at the time, so I stood on a little stool. Ruby B. had taken down a small cast iron skillet, and was teaching me to cook eggs. Long before I was born Ruby B. had worked at my granddad’s cabinetry factory. Grandad died before I was on the scene and that business had been closed not long after he passed away. Everybody knew Ruby B., she was a town fixture. She even wrote a regular social column for the local newspaper where she reported on all the goings-on each week. She used to write me letters at summer camp, and sometimes our family would show up in her newspaper articles. 

The day I’m remembering now, she had taken this little toe-headed boy as her apprentice in the kitchen. I was blessed to grow up around a lot of great cooks, my Mom and Grandmothers included, and Ruby B. was a great cook too. A great cook in the southern tradition where any real concern for health is right out the window. Bring on the bacon grease, bring on the butter. Don’t skimp, we’re going for flavor here. 

My parents still have that little cast iron skillet that Ruby B. brought out that day. She put a generous portion of bacon grease in it (we always kept a little jar of bacon grease aside. You’ll find one in my kitchen right now, in fact). She showed me how to scramble and fry. How to add a little milk, salt and pepper. She taught me that eggs cook fast so you don’t want the heat to be too high. Cook them slow and easy and don’t let them dry out. And if you’re making a big breakfast with other components, the eggs should be the very last thing, because they cool as fast as they cook. 

That was a threshold moment for me. Before it I didn’t know how to cook eggs, and after that day, I did. An experience was interjected into my life that changed what was possible for me. It changed me from a regular kid to an egg-cookin’ kid.  To this day, I love to cook. In fact, it’s one of life’s big joys for me. It may sound silly, but spending some time in the kitchen cooking a really good meal is often the cure for a really stressful day. That particular day in the kitchen with Ruby B. was one of the early experiences of my childhood that put that love for cooking in me. I’m so thankful.  

Last night our small group met to finish the last in a series on Nehemiah by Dr. John Oswalt. Oswalt described the return of the Israelites from Exile to the ruined city of Jerusalem. The temple had been obliterated by the Babylonians and the wall around the city had been torn down. The Lord calls Nehemiah to organize a rebuilding campaign to restore the wall and its gates, and to reconstruct the temple. But what’s really going on, Oswalt points out, is that God is rebuilding a people whose identity has been demolished. How will God rebuild his people after exile? How will he reconstitute their sense of themselves as a people belonging to Yahweh? How will he restore and fortify their imaginations with hope and purpose, after they’ve been so deeply ruined by exile? 

Oswalt’s answer was fascinating to me. God will give them a concrete, tangible task. He will rebuild the people, through the process of having them rebuild the city.  

There’s a clue here to how people grow – how people are transformed. Abstract pronouncements don’t tend to transform us. We wish they would, because that would mean simply explaining the facts reasonably to our upset friend would flip a switch and solve everything. Similarly, sheer willpower doesn’t typically transform people. That’s likely very relatable here at the beginning of February, now that those new year’s resolutions have fallen by the wayside. Mere information and mere willpower don’t usually get us all that far. We need longer processes of creative and relational growth. 

Israel’s understanding of themselves has been almost completely obliterated, yet here they are back in the old promised land. Look at it; it’s a dump. And God says, clean it up. The slow, concrete practice of putting the city back together is the exterior work through which God will work a corresponding inner healing. It is mysterious, but that’s one major way that people actually become different. What we labor at, what we practice, what we pay attention to, molds and shapes our souls. And we have to start doing this kind of thing long before we feel like doing it, and we have to do it with other people. One more thing, we need a leader from the outside (like Nehemiah) to break in and demonstrate the new possibility. 

Some years ago, I had a great counselor who explained the idea of open vs closed systems, and it has stuck with me. (Much of Proverbs is about the wisdom of open-systems) She said that in a closed system, nothing new is allowed to enter, and so change is not possible for that person. The Closed System person seeks no advice, tries nothing new, listens to no one, deflects consequences, blames and takes no responsibility, and so on. They become like a stagnant pond that has no inlet and no outlet. Eventually, the closed system becomes so cut off that they become stuck in their own little world of muddy, stagnancy where nothing can live or grow. That’s hard-heartedness. 

On the other hand, the Open System person seeks counsel, is willing to try something new, takes risks, takes responsibility, listens and learns from failure, and so on. They recognize that they need other people – that some resource from outside of themselves to break into the circle and bring new possibilities that they can’t simply generate on their own. This open system person has access to a flowing inlet of fresh water, and they have an outlet whereby they can let go of what needs to be let go of. 

This is just what we see across Scripture as God repeatedly knocks on the door of the world and enters into the otherwise closed-system to introduce new possibilities. He steps into the most stagnant of situations and brings fresh water. He digs an outlet trench so that certain things can be washed out. In the Old Testament, God steps into a world stagnant with pagan cruelty, the anxiety of idolotry, the terror of human sacrifice (even child sacrifice), and begins to introduce a new way of life to Abraham, and later to rabble of rescued slaves who he transforms into a people. In the New Testament, the inflow of possibility exponentially increases with the arrival of Jesus who introduced unimaginable hope. It turns out, anything is possible with God, the closed-system is blown so wide-open that even death is flushed right through the outlet into the abyss. Then the Holy Spirit steps in at Pentecost and the system opens even wider – anyone from any nation has access to this newly introduced transformative hope of forgiveness and resurrection in Jesus. 

And on it goes.  

Like Ruby B. introduced the possibility of cooking to me when I was a kid, something new has entered the world for us, and we can practice it and find ourselves tasting new and wonderful things. Like Israel rebuilding Jerusalem, discovering that as they work, God is showing them what good things are possible in their own beat up hearts. 

If this world had remained a closed-system nothing could change for us. But that is not the case. The system has been opened and the world’s creator has entered into it and offered himself as its healer. Any good thing is possible now. The only thing that remains is whether we will be open or closed? Whether we will remain stagnant or be refreshed? Shut our ears and eyes or open them to new songs and new visions of hope.