He Asked How They Made It
The word for Wednesday, August 12, 2026 is He Asked How They Made It.
The anchor verses are Psalm 119:19 and John 7:16.
Craig Bowerson had been cooking for a living for more than thirty years when he took a job running the kitchen at a nursing home in McPherson, Kansas.
The complaints were the worst he had seen anywhere. About three quarters of the residents were dissatisfied with the food. He says he had never had numbers like that in his career.
So he did what a person does with a problem in his own field. He worked the menu. He knew how to cook. That was the job.
It kept not working.
Then, during the long stretch of lockdown when he was around those residents more than the job required, he stopped trying to fix the menu and asked them a different kind of question.
Not what do you want on the menu.
How did you make spaghetti. How did you make lasagna. How did you make your chicken cordon bleu.
Several hundred recipes came back the first week. Some of them handwritten. Some passed down through families for generations, from women who had cooked those meals for fifty years in kitchens they no longer live in.
He rebuilt the menu out of what they gave him. Dissatisfaction went from three quarters to almost nothing.
Two of the meals are worth knowing about.
There was a man named Bill with dementia who was regressing back toward his childhood. He kept telling Bowerson that his father had been a chef in Winnetka, Illinois. So Bowerson called the Winnetka Chamber of Commerce, gathered whatever information he could find, and recreated dishes from Bill's father.
And there was a chili mac that is now permanently on the menu because residents keep asking for it. The man who submitted it did not have the recipe. His wife had died, and what he had left of it was a six-item shopping list. Bowerson spent two weeks testing versions until the man tasted one and said it needed cheese. That was the missing thing. Cheese.
Bowerson said something about what changed in him. Once you get that personal connection, you realize you are a guest in their house.
He was the professional. Thirty years, the training, the credentials, the kitchen. And the thing that turned it around was deciding he was the guest.
Now open Psalm 119, which is the longest chapter in the Bible and is almost entirely about loving GOD's law. In the middle of all that devotion, the writer says this.
I am a stranger in the earth: hide not thy commandments from me.
A man who has spent his life on the word of GOD calls himself a stranger. Not an authority. Not somebody who has earned a seat. A stranger, asking not to be shut out of what GOD has said.
That is not false modesty. It is the posture the whole psalm is written from.
A stranger has to ask. A stranger cannot assume he already knows how things are done in the house he has walked into. That is the difference between the man who studies GOD and the man who has decided he has GOD figured out.
And Jesus takes the same position about HIS own teaching. In the temple courts, when people were amazed at how much HE knew, HE said this.
My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me.
The Son of GOD, standing in the temple, saying the teaching is not HIS own.
Somewhere in the second century a man named Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century teacher who defended the faith against those who dressed up error to look like truth, wrote a long book about people who had built enormous systems to explain the universe. Thirty layers of invented beings. Secret names. Passwords for the dying.
They kept producing. Nobody counted as advanced among them until he had invented something nobody had said the day before.
When Irenaeus finally stated his own position, it took one paragraph. There is one GOD, who made everything by HIS Word, and nothing exists that HE did not make. No exceptions. That was the whole answer.
Short, because it did not belong to him.
There is somebody near you who knows something you have been trying to solve on your own.
Not a professional. Not a book. A person, in your house or on your street or at the end of a hallway, who has done it, or lived it, or lost the same thing you are losing.
And the reason you have not asked is probably the reason Bowerson did not ask for a long time. It is easier to keep working the problem with your own tools than to walk in and admit you are the guest.
He asked how they made spaghetti.
That was where it started. The whole intervention began with a question. And a man with dementia got his father's cooking back, and a widower got his wife's chili mac, and it only took two weeks and a conversation about cheese.
I am not here to prove myself. I am here to make HIM visible.
- 🙏 To the one solving it alone because asking would mean admitting you cannot.
- 🙏 To the one whose recipes and stories nobody has asked about in years.
- 🙏 To the one who has the credentials and has stopped learning anything.
- 🙏 To the one holding a short list of what is left of somebody you loved.
Grace and Peace.