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| © Elise Grinstead 2010 |
It was the summer of 2006. I parked my car in the alley by the side kitchen door to that church in Santa Monica and opened the back. Boxes and bags full of food items of the meal I planned for the day made it through the frame and onto the stainless steel counters of the kitchen. Sorting through the items, I either organized them onto the countertops by dish or placed them into the industrial-sized refrigerator/freezer until it was needed. I looked over the recipes and set forth a course of action for the next 2-3 hours. Large pots, pans, cutting boards, knives, tools, and more emerged from the cabinets as I set about preparing, one task after the other. The kitchen consisted of just me for over two hours each day, Monday through Friday—and an hour of silence in planning and two hours of grocery shopping solo preceded it. It was a quiet summer, one both I reveled in and questioned. “Why did I sign up for this job, if the purpose of this summer is mainly to minister to people? Why so many hours alone in this seemingly solitary endeavor? What is the purpose behind this?”
Night after night, the routine happened with as much clockwork as 20-something-year-olds can muster. My assistant would arrive about an hour before dinner was to be served, followed by a team of 4-6 people trickling in at 5 p.m. asking “what can I do to help?” as I would dole out responsibilities like getting the plates, taking bowls and dishes of food to the serving tables, making the lemonade in the beloved yellow drink dispenser, and more. And then, around 5:30, the masses would start trickling in—table after table filled until we reached our count of over 60 students for dinner. The blessing would be spoken and dinner would be served. I would eventually eat myself, being a sticky, hot mess from the often 90+ degree kitchen and engage in some conversation. My peers had been out through the day across the city of Santa Monica, working jobs such as at McDonalds or Gap, or took classes at the local community college. What was it that we had in common? We were all college students, gathered together in the city of Santa Monica, CA, living in a “retro” motel together for 10 weeks, with the aim to grow in our relationships with the Lord and be ministers of the Gospel to the community who did not know Him.
Dinner was typically the first gathering of these people for the day, which would be followed by the evening session or activity. It was a cornerstone of the day, of sorts, since our other meals were on our own. I remember the buzz of energy these different people brought and contributed to the whole. The church auditorium resembled a high-school cafeteria, albeit with a bit more maturity. Forty-five minutes or so would pass until it was time to clean up, with a team assigned to do so every night. Again, I would dole out responsibilities. The nights that we had leftover food usually went to a select few males who had bottomless stomachs. The evening activity would come, and then around 9 or 10 p.m., we would head back to our motel. I was often exhausted and turned in early in order to do it all again the next day. I slept soundly while others participated in late-night activities in the alleyway, made ice-cream runs, or snuck into the cemeteries. And the quietness would cycle again.
There was one moment towards the end of the summer where I finally saw the purpose behind it. I was putting the last of the food on the table when everyone else was seated, and I looked out at my peers. I heard it quietly and firmly:
“Elise, you are ministering to the saints. Even the providing of the most basic needs—dinner—enables them to do what I have before them this summer. And, you are equipped to do so. This is good. Embrace it. This is purposeful for you too, in that you learn to serve in the quiet ways and learn to hear Me better through it.”It’s interesting to see how those small, yet profound moments can set a course for the rest of your life. The last six years have brought much cooking and baking, in the forms of dinner parties and invitations, treats for co-workers at work and classmates, and even the simple nightly tasks of dinner on the table. It has evolved locations from house and large apartment kitchens in San Luis Obispo, the parents’ kitchens in Colorado, and now small apartment kitchens in Brooklyn. It is a joy, and I enjoy seeing people satiated and content—but moreso, I love the fellowship that is brought when people gather together over food in the home setting.
And, it still leads me further into food and hunger as a whole. I continue to pray and seek the Lord’s timing on when to venture forth into assisting a small orphanage/AIDS resource center in Uganda in developing partnerships for their monthly food needs for the orphans under their care. I have been involved with them for a few years now in a small way, and I believe the Lord has encouraged me to see what surrounds me here in NYC with resources and people, potential partnerships, and how that can be extended forth to multiply in Ugandan dollars. Their need is so relatively small on the US scale, but tremendous on the Ugandan level.
With one element—food—there is vision in past, present, and future. The seeming small things that seemed insignificant at the time, the Lord deemed purposeful and continued to lead and speak through it.
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For those of you who read this blog regularly or over the years, you probably know by now that I love writing. It is something I have done for a long time and believe I will do for a long time. That too, has been something I have felt the Lord asking me to be diligent and faithful with. I haven’t known all the reasons why or what it will look like, and I still don’t fully. But there are glimpses, and there are pieces revealing. I shared some lyrics with our worship director at our church back in February, and he ended up sharing them with some other songwriters he knew. One of them contacted me a couple of months ago saying she read through them and one of them really stood out to her and she wanted to put it to music. We have since met with her twice and it has been a beautifully encouraging process. I am thankful for her talent and her heart. I am thankful for my husband being a wonderful bridge in the process between me as a writer and her as a musician, offering much needed critique and suggestions. The process has forced me to revisit times and lessons of four years ago and critically think about what God has taught me since then—what do these words mean today? What can they mean for others? What needs to be spoken through this? I am excited to continue forth in this process and see what the Lord does through it.
I read through this passage over and over, and I continue to be challenged and encouraged in it:
What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building.
According to the grace of God given to me, like a skilled master builder I laid a foundation, and someone else is building upon it. Let each one take care how he builds upon it. For no one can lay a foundation other than that which is laid, which is Jesus Christ. Now if anyone builds on the foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, straw— each one's work will become manifest, for the Day will disclose it, because it will be revealed by fire, and the fire will test what sort of work each one has done. 1 Corinthians 3:5-13
We are all servants, God’s fellow workers, doing the labor He has put before us to do. There are different things we do concurrently, and also others we do successively. God has appointed it, and He will bring the growth He deems for it through our laboring in it. We can trust and know that our individual tasks come to the collective whole of what God desires, and that the timing is in His control.
Yet, it is crucial to remember the foundation laid beneath us—always steady and unshakable—Jesus Christ. In knowing this, we should take care to build with the things of worth, with intentional work and care taken into it. We are wise enough to know which elements will stand in longevity, and which will fall away quickly at the first sight of a storm. It often takes time to build something of worth—for those things are more rare and precious.
I think of these truths outlined in this passage, and I think of the examples the Lord is encouraging me with in my own life. I am reminded to carry forth and be faithful in what has been put before me, taking care to build wisely with it, even if it may seem insignificant in the present moment. The things that are substantial take time, but God grants the growth and makes it what He desires it to be.
