Questions, Questions, Questions
Some fragmented thoughts on food, prayer, hope, travel, and other things that folks on Instagram asked about
Thursday, September 5
Grand Rapids, Mich.
The other day, inspired by my dear friend Sarah Bessey, I asked folks on Instagram to ask me anything. Well, they responded. I’ll answer as many of the questions as I can.
There were so many questions about food! It’s as if you think I think about food all the time. (You’re right. I do!)
What’s your favorite vegetable and how do you fix it?
No doubt, it’s the potato. To God be the glory for the wondrous tuber. I love potatoes almost every way: French fries, of course (McDonalds will always be my No. 1, especially those tiny, crispy bits at the bottom of the container); mashed potatoes (I usually add sour cream or Greek yogurt for tang); jacket potatoes (a mainstay meal when I was a fledgling journalist in London); potato chips (the Kettle Chips jalapeño ones—yum). I could go on and on and on.
I rebuke anyone who says the potato is a starch, not a vegetable. The US Department of Agriculture officially classifies the potato as a vegetable, as do botanists. A nasty rumor emerged that it might be recategorized as a grain. Absurd.
One favorite, for special occasions, comes from my friend Beth and her family. I made it just last night.
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Potatoes of Wonderfulness
1 1/2 c heavy cream
1 sprig fresh thyme
2 cloves garlic, chopped
1/2 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2-4 potatoes (depends on the size!), cut into 1/8 inch slices
1/2 cup grated parmesan cheese, plus more for broiling
Preheat oven to 375. In a saucepan, heat the cream gently with the thyme, garlic, and nutmeg. While the cream heats, butter a casserole dish. Place a layer of potatoes in the dish and season with salt and pepper. It’s okay if they overlap a bit. Remove cream from heat and pour a little over potatoes. Top with some grated cheese. Repeat with two more layers, pouring the rest of the cream over at the end. Bake uncovered for 45 minutes. Sprinkle more cheese on top and broil until the top just browns. Serves 4-6.
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Favorite restaurant in Grand Rapids?
We rarely go out to eat when we’re home. I’m only half-joking when I say I’m a recluse. But when we do go out, we like Grove. Its food is interesting, and Grove would stand up against some of our favorite places in New York City.
Favorite food when sick?
If there’s one thing I love more than potatoes, it’s rice. And when I’m sick, nothing feels better than a warm bowl of congee. Typically I’d just make the porridge with white rice and chicken broth, plenty of salt and pepper, and a scattering of finely chopped green onions on top. Honestly, when I’m sick, that’s about all I can manage. It’s so simple—and it tastes like rest, and it tastes like home.
Favorite foods that aren’t comfort food?
What constitutes a comfort food? I find nearly all good food to be comforting in some form, whether it’s a dish that I’ve had a thousand times or one that’s new to me.
I will tell you that, the older I get, the less I enjoy interminable tasting menus that are allegedly the marker of contemporary fine dining but that seem designed to satisfy not the diner but the chef: Look what I can do! Taste how imaginative I am. What’s lost in the performance is often the pleasure of something that simply tastes good.
Best Austin barbecue recommendation?
You could start a little civil war with this question. Franklin is perhaps the most lauded; we tried it during the pandemic, when they were offering their full menu curbside. It was superb. Most of the time, though, we aren’t willing to wait and wait and wait, and there are so many great options around town. Micklethwait is my usual go-to; the lines aren’t as long, and it’s reliably excellent, so much so that we almost always have a piece of Micklethwait brisket in our freezer.
The next most-common question was about dogs and specifically the Fozz.
We’re still sad. Sometimes I surprise myself and start tearing up unexpectedly. But we are slowly adjusting to a quieter home and different rhythms. Will we eventually get another dog? Probably. But not anytime soon. We have a lot of travel in the next year, we need some space, and we don’t want to feel as if we are replacing Fozzie. But we do love dogs, and there are so, so many in shelters who could use good homes.
To matters of the soul and the spirit.
Is prayer for us or for God? I hate the guilt people feel when they don’t pray enough.
Both/and? For me, one of prayer’s most important functions is to remember that we aren’t alone in this [waves hands at whatever mix of mess “this” might be]. Some things absolutely are beyond us and ought to be shoved right back onto God’s to-do list. Others might feel beyond us, because they are weighty and hard, but prayer, which is to say conversation with the divine, helps us see that there might be something we can do. Anyway, who’s to say what is “enough”?
Eugene Peterson has a wonderful little section on prayer in his marvelous Eat This Book. He refers to the biblical psalms as “a school for prayer,” and suggests that the psalms give us “a feel for what is appropriate to say as we bring our lives into attentive and worshipping response to God.... As we do this, the first thing we realize is that in prayer anything goes. Virtually everything human is appropriate as material for prayer: reflections and observations, fear and anger, guilt and sin, questions and doubts, needs and desires, praise and gratitude, suffering and death,” he writes. “Nothing human is excluded.” What a wide-open invitation! Why, I wonder, do so many of us often decline that invitation? I suspect it’s partly because we feel some need to get prayer “right.” But maybe there is no way to get it wrong, given that Scripture says that prayer can even be sighs and groans.
I’ll admit that one genre of prayer in which I currently feel lack is the prayer of gratitude. I’m trying to be more lavish in my gratitude—I have much to be grateful for—to give credit where it’s due as wellas to recognize how, despite challenge and hardship, beauty and goodness really do accompany me through this life, often in ways I take for granted.
How do I maintain hope for my child’s future despite <looks at the whole world rn>?
The theologian Christena Cleveland once wrote that “hopelessness is a marker of privilege.” Who has time for despair? Who can make space for this particular kind of despondency?
During my 20+ years as a journalist, I’ve traveled to some tough places. I snuck into Zimbabwe during the Mugabe regime, when foreign reporters were essentially banned; I’ve written about poverty in Rwanda and LGBTQ+ folks in Uganda; multiple times, I’ve asked interviewees whether they might like to meet for lunch or dinner, knowing they weren’t sure where their next meal was coming from. In the most dire situations, the people I might (unwisely) have pitied taught me something about hope, resilience, and inner strength. They’ve preached a thousand sermons about hope amid tremendous adversity, and they’re largely why I refuse to give despair much purchase in my heart when it begins to surface. It’s easy to feel panic when you have much to lose. When you have little, what option do you have but hope?
One of the most unforgettable conversations of my life was with a Rwandan farmer named Marta Mukakalisa. She’d survived the genocide but lost her husband. In addition to caring for her own kids, she had taken in some orphaned relatives. Thanks to a nonprofit, she had one cow and a flock of chickens. As we talked in her outdoor kitchen, which doubled as her chicken coop, I realized we were standing in chicken shit—and she just radiated gratitude and possibility. She was sure that the eggs and milk that she sold would mean education and a better future for her children. Someday, she mused, she might even have an indoor kitchen. How had she held onto and even grown her hope? I still wonder. Maybe she had no other choice.
The mess of the world should move us to be hopeful, not hopeless. There has to be a better way. There has to be wiser leadership. There has to be more communal care. There has to be more love of neighbor.
More than once, Martin Luther King Jr. said that “the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” This is sometimes misinterpreted as being a statement about human power and will. It is not. When King proclaimed these words on the steps of the Alabama State Capitol in 1965, he also echoed the psalmist in asking, “How long?” Then he said: “Not long, because: Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord; He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.” The context was clear: God does the bending; we’re invited to participate. God has mapped the arc; we’re encouraged to see it. God is the ultimate source of our hope; we’re asked to believe and to hold on and to come alongside one another in solidarity.
So let’s talk about those kids: So many young people who are coming up in the world are openhearted in ways I am still learning to be. They’re fierce and loyal. They know they’re not inheriting a perfect world. They have few illusions, but they do have big dreams, more grit than they often get credit for, and wicked humor to boot. To me, many of them are hope embodied—and an inspiration.
How did you know you wanted to preach?
I didn’t. My legs still tremble every time I teach, whether it’s a Zoom Bible study with 10 people or a room with 1,000. It was my late friend Rachel Held Evans who kept pushing me onstage, and I still hear her exasperated exhortations every time I step into the pulpit.
I love writing sermons; I love the study, looking at the original text and the differing translations, imagining the context into which the Scriptures were first written, and exploring the various possibilities of how to understand ancient sacred literature. But preaching? I’ve said before and will say again that it takes some audacity to insert oneself into others’ journeys with God. So I do the work of preaching with no illusions. I know both my own insufficiency or the holy responsibility of the task, and I take comfort in my conviction that a good preacher works not alone but in collaboration with the Spirit. Most times, I preach sermons that I want to believe. I need good news, so I try to offer some to others who might be seeking the same.
What’s one practice you’d recommend to stay grounded in this current moment?
To care for another living thing. Fozzie expanded my heart. Momo and Zuko, the corgis that visited our house last week, bowled me over with their irrepressible verve. Every zinnia and cosmo blossoming in my garden fills me with wonder. So embrace a cute creature. Put your hands in the soil. Sow seeds. Cut up a potato, plop it in the ground, and watch it make delicious babies. Your basil plant might wither, but there was more than one seed in the packet. Try again and believe in second chances.
Please weigh in on the new Coldplay song. Is it really a sign of a spiritual awakening?
I confess I had to google “new Coldplay song.” I do like some Coldplay songs, but they’re not on my current regular rotation, as much as I enjoyed Chris Martin’s episode of Carpool Karaoke. Two things: 1) I don’t much like speculating on the spiritual condition of folks I don’t know. 2) Martin’s songwriting has always been suffused with spiritual themes. He grew up in church, in the west of England, and the marks of his churchy childhood are all over his music. You can quibble over what it means when he sings about Jerusalem bells ringing or why he thinks St. Peter won’t call his name (“Viva la Vida”). But try to convince me that the shimmering “When I Need a Friend,” which begins, “Holy, holy, dove descend....”, isn’t essentially a hymn. Martin has said, too, that “Til Kingdom Come” draws on the Lord’s Prayer, and “A Message” was inspired by and even echoes Samuel Crossman’s old hymn “My Song Is Love Unknown.”
“We Pray” might seem more explicit in some sense. But what is a spiritual awakening? It seems to imply that he was somehow spiritually asleep. Read Martin’s lyrics, and you can see a clear through-line over the decades—his longing for transcendence and even for salvation, however you want to define it. I admire his vulnerability. And to yearn for something as he does seems to me to be awake, to be searching, to be attentive. As Simone Weil famously wrote, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”
Even if you don’t care about Coldplay at all, I think “When I Need a Friend” is worth a listen—and worth tucking away for those days when you, too, need a friend.
Travel-related questions.
Quite a few of you asked when I might be coming to your part of the world to speak or teach. (Hello, Australia! I see you, Toronto!) I’m honored! The honest answer is that I say yes to most reasonable invitations; by “reasonable,” I mean any that compensate me fairly for my time and labor. As much as I wish I were independently wealthy and could go here, there, and everywhere on my own dime, this isn’t the reality. I write a new talk or sermon for every audience, which takes, at minimum, twenty hours—and that doesn’t count the days on the road. When I was a seminary intern, I was paid as little as $75 to preach. I trust you can do the math—and I’m just not willing to do that anymore. If you do have an invitation for me, email booking@makebelievefarmer.com and we can discuss. I’m always open to the conversation.
Ever plan to return to South Africa?
Some of you know that my last trip to South Africa ended rather badly. Still, I love the country—and I continue in my PhD studies at Stellenbosch. I’ll be back there in October. Can’t wait.
Most inspiring place you’ve ever traveled?
We went to New Zealand for our honeymoon in 2013, and I’m so excited to return (we’re headed there, on assignment for Travel+Leisure, in February). I don’t know how anyone could see its majestic landscapes and not feel awe and wonder.
Are you a carry-on-only traveler, or are you comfortable checking your bag?
En route to a destination, I almost always try to get everything into my carry-on. But there’s almost always an extra duffel stashed inside, and on the way home, it’s typically impossible not to check. Tracking technology is such that I have rarely arrived home before my luggage—remember the days when there were no barcodes, just tags with the airport code or even handwritten labels?—and we always have AirTags tucked into our checked luggage. I also try to remind myself that I am a person of faith.
Books, books, books.
What are you currently reading?
I’m working on some sermons on texts from the Gospel of Mark, so I have a commentary edited by Nicole Wilkinson Duran, Teresa Okure, and Daniel M. Patte open on my desk. Okure, a Nigerian Catholic theologian, is a key source for my dissertation, so I am paying particular attention to her writing.
I’m also partway through the Pulitzer-winning novelist Paul Harding’s This Other Eden. It’s a fictionalized account of an island community off the coast of Maine, inspired by a true story that Harding came across in a 1980 article from Down East magazine. So far, I’m loving it—though “love” feels an ill-fitting word given the sobering themes: racism and classism, mental illness and disability, poverty and mission work. Harding is a great storyteller, though.
Favorite books?
I love so many books.
Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan, is probably the best book I’ve read in the past two years. Not a word misplaced, not a sentence wasted. The economy of her writing is breathtaking. The story ripped my heart out.
Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. I love a good, epic-scale family drama. Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi, is another such novel I adored and admired.
A Little Life, by Hanya Yanagihara, is a book that I will always hold in my soul, but I can’t recommend that anyone read it. Tristan called it “that book that made you sad.” I wrote an essay about it some years ago, which you can read on the Vox website.
Others: Where the Red Fern Grows, by Wilson Rawls, which I first read in eighth grade and still makes me cry. Ecclesiastes. Goodbye to Berlin, by Christopher Isherwood. Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees. Oh, and all of Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes books.
Let’s end on the loveliest of questions, inspired, of course, by my dear friend and hero Barbara Brown Taylor: What is saving you right now?
Honestly, it’s gratitude. Scrolling through all your questions, I’m so thankful for the ways in which we accompany one another through this life with curiosity and wonder. Over the next three weeks, I will get to preach in three different pulpits, all thanks to the invitations of dear friends (Ashley Hamel at St. Mark’s UMC in Houston, Jonah Smith-Bartlett at Battery Park Christian Church in Richmond, Va., and Mihee Kim-Kort at the First Presbyterian Church of Annapolis, Md.). As introverted as I am, I would not be alive were it not for the care of people who have loved me well, and I am overwhelmed with thanksgiving for the beautiful humans who have taught me what it means to love imperfectly but unconditionally, not least my beloved Tristan.
As alluded to above, a reminder that I’ll be preaching at St. Mark’s in Houston this Sunday. Worship is at 8:30 a.m. and 11 a.m. Central time. If you’re not in Houston, you can catch the 11 a.m. service on YouTube. In between services, at 10 a.m., I’ll be offering a brief preview of Good Soil.
I think that’s more than enough for one letter to you! I’ll try to write again soon and maybe answer some more of the questions folks posed on Instagram. If you, gentle newsletter reader, have any questions, it seems only fair to extend the invitation to you as well: Ask me anything. You can post a comment below, or if you’d rather ask the question privately, you can always email me at makebelievefarmer@gmail.com. And tell me: What is saving you right now?
Much love,
Jeff
"I also try to remind myself that I am a person of faith" might be my favourite sentence ever written.
Yes to all of this but especially the answer about hope and despair.