Chapati Lessons!!

Although I was unable to travel with my team to Northern Kenya, I found ministry on the YWAM base.  Usually, you could find me in the kitchen peeling potatoes or carrots, chopping up onions, carrots, and tomatoes, sorting beans, or rolling out chapati.  If I wasn’t in the kitchen, I was probably outside washing up the dishes that had piled up from throughout the day. 

I heard life stories in the kitchen, around the dinner table, and while roaming the base and bush.  Stories included: stealing food to stay alive or pay for school fees, getting thrown into jail, never going to school, using food rations to “pay” others to learn how to read and write while in prison, having witchdoctors as family members and learning how to create the “medicines, enchantments, and charms”, selling drugs, falling off a building as a young child and cracking open your head, being rescued by a stranger, being beaten and whipped by parents and family members, having a lifelong sentence to jail but being released after 19….stories I can’t fully share.  Stories I can’t fully get out of my head.  However, sprinkled into each story was a hint of hope, a pinch of God’s mercy, and a heaping spoonful of God’s protection and love.  

Recipe from the kitchen (how I remember making it…this may not be totally accurate!)

Chapati:

2.2 kg flour

2-3 handfuls salt

2-3 handfuls sugar

1+ cups oil

3+ cups water

Mix flour, salt, and sugar

Add a cup of oil

Mix

Keep adding water and kneading until a nice dough forms that is not sticky.

Once you have a nice ball of plump dough, roll it out until it’s about ¼ inch think.  Add lots of oil on top and spread it out.  Cut into slices.

Roll slices into “balls”.  Roll out balls into circles. 

Fry in pan on both sides on a metal pan over a coal burner/fire, but don’t burn it and don’t add too much oil when cooking it. 

When serving a large crowd (aka making over 100) this recipe is quadrupled.  Don’t forget to do this with friends and jam out to Christian music in the process.  It makes the hours go by so much more quickly 🙂  

The stories I heard reminded me life and of the chapati process. 

Every batch (story) was made differently, although the same basic ingredients were used.  We are all human, but each one of us is made differently.  We have sweet moments mixed into our lives.  We have moments that make us salty as well.  We need the living water to be part of our lives or else the recipe is incomplete.  We need oil-extra lubrication- (the word of God, prayer, Bible studies) to help the dry parts of our lives or keep us from getting dry.  When all of these “ingredients” are added together in the right portions, that only the baker knows, can our lives be formed into something beautiful. 

While mixing and kneading the chapati, you feel the texture….

If it’s too dry, you add more water or oil.  If it’s too sticky…more flour.  It’s the baker’s HANDS that FEEL all of this.  Just like the baker uses his hands to feel and make the chapati into the right consistency…God has his hands in our lives too.  He knows every part of you.  He knows the sweet moments of your life…he knows the moments that make you “salty” or that have hurt you.  Although it’s all mixed in, he knows you completely…he made you! When frying, he knows how much heat you can take before you become burnt. 

Just like the baker knows how to use the ingredients in the right proportions to make a delicious tasting chapati that everyone wants to eat and craves more of, God knows your hurts, mistakes, joys, and desires and uses those to make you into a uniquely created human.  And when you live your life knowing who you are in God—loved, adored, adopted, son or daughter, healed, highly favored, anointed, heir to the throne—people want to “eat you up” and taste the goodness that the baker has created! 

“TASTE and see that the Lord is GOOD!  Blessed is the one who takes refuge in him!” Psalm 34:8

 (Chapati made into a Rolex!)