My cooking used to be a performance given in an empty room. I lived alone for about 20 years, and through all that time I enjoyed cooking, but unless I welcomed a guest the cooking was only for me. My household is larger now after getting married, and I share any food I cook, so I have an audience. I’m in the kitchen more because we need to eat, but I cook more because I enjoy sharing it with others in my house.

We cook because we need to eat to live. We satisfy a basic need for the energy and nourishment we need for living, but cooking and eating are more than filling up an empty fuel tank for our bodies. Eating brings joy. Think of a favorite meal, and my guess is you have all kinds of happiness just with the thought. Food we really like makes us really happy. Food brings us together, too. If you are a part of a gathering with friends or family more than likely you’re having food together. If you’re connecting with someone, my guess is you’ll be connecting around some type of food or drink. I cook now because my family needs to eat, but I cook as well because it brings us together. The meal we share is something that connects us, and the conversation we have as we share it brings us together. I cook now, maybe more out of anything, for love, love for my new family and the hope that in eating it the love we have will be stronger.

Brother Lawrence’s job was in the kitchen of the monastery. The mundane task of cooking and cleaning there wasn’t a distraction to his faith, though, but it was something that was intertwined with his prayer and love for God. We’re told in the second conversation recorded in The Practice of the Presence of God that Lawrence had an aversion to kitchen work, but he learned “to do everything there for the love of God, and with prayer, upon all occasions, for his grace to do his work well.” Lawrence learned to do “little things for the love of God,” and that was enough to give him joy.

It’s all one, the love we show to God or family or friend or neighbor or enemy. 1 John tells us that we should love each other because love is from God and when we show love we know God (4:7). This love is rarely lived out in grand gestures; usually we show love in little details, in taking out the trash, folding laundry, or making a meal. These little tasks don’t need to be a distraction from our faith; they are the place where our love for God and each other is tangibly expressed.

I met a man whose young adult son had a job where he traveled around the world, dining in expensive restaurants. He said his son liked to return home to his family table, where his mother did most of the cooking, because “he could taste the love in it.”