Recipes are other people's creations.

The Story of With

A great book recommended by Terry Whalin in his newsletter is The Story of With. It can be applied to anybody’s life in its unique but universal message.

Mia, the main character, is trying to find her way to the place she needs to go in her life. One station along her route is a perfect kitchen filled with pleasant and skilled chefs. Some of them take her under their wings and help her. She has always wanted to be a chef. She’s a great cook, but she has always cooked exactly by recipes.

A chef in charge of helping her encourages her to choose seven ingredients and create a dish. As he and the others in her group assist her, he asks a question. What if other people don’t like your dish?  

She said she’d toss it out and start over. She’d try a new recipe. But he’d already explained to her that recipes are merely other people’s creations.  I digress a moment. The author had already shown that Mia and the chefs were following the recognized methods of cooking. They weren’t breaking the established rules; instead ,the established rules and the kind chef gave her the freedom to use the skill of cooking to create her own dish.

Back to the question—

“Do not change for the critic! We are responsible to create with the Creator and then serve it to the hungry. If others don’t like it, that doesn’t invalidate the dish.” (quoted from The Story of With) He went on to explain that “we cook to satisfy body and soul rather than on order.”

I love the next thing he said. “If someone prefers another dish, let them learn to cook that rather than simply critique what another has been called to do.”

Chains fell from Mia’s heart...and from mine.

As a writer, I try to follow the rules and study to become a better writer than I was the day before. Yet I cannot follow the recipes. I can’t seem to fit my books into the current acceptable genres. Attending the Early Bird Workshop of ACFW featuring Donald Maas, as I studied at the feet of the master, and reading his books about the way to become a better writer, I realized my style of writing is okay, even though I’m not a genre writer. Writing in a certain genre is just not my blessing. It is a gift to others, but I have other gifts.

The book I’m giving away this week The Dream Bucket, is listed as an inspirational romance because it needs to be included somewhere. It is a romance, but it’s also the journey a young girl and her mother take to the place they need to go.