No More Anxiety Over What To Serve Guests
By Goldie Chong
MYmother was not a cook. I am not a cook. Growing up we always had servants who took care of the cooking.
When we first migrated to Australia I didn’t even know how to cook rice in an electric rice cooker. Admitting I can’t cook we usually entertained guests in restaurants. Tek attempted to give me suggestions on how to buy and even freeze takeaways for unexpected guests. Being an expert at making instant noodles (he eats it almost every day as a supper snack) he also tried serving guests instant noodles by making them tastier with value added ingredients like fish balls, squid, etc. All this worked somewhat but recently God taught me He wanted to improve on our hospitality practices.
Recently we wanted to have guests in the home, so we can talk better than in a restaurant. My problem of what to serve them. My dilemma was solved when Peng Khim a former restaurant owner, out of the blue said he was cooking Melaka chicken for us and would bring it to the house. Problem solved. Another day Kar Meng, an accountant turned pastor, asked if we would like to have our regular fellowship over his famous fish head curry. It happened that we were having guests the next day so again the problem of what to serve was solved. Recently after a lunch meeting May who cooked a big pot of Thai curry offered the remainder for me to take home. Again, the guests we had the next day got to enjoy it. Our Saturday Oikos Fellowship always ends with a pot bless dinner and Herlina our capable cook in charge of food never fails to cook an extra portion for me to take home. She also sees to it that the members who live alone also gets to take home a box of leftovers of which there is always plenty. The portion that I get is usually shared with our family when we have our weekly family dinner which relieves me a great deal.
Experiencing the five loaves and two fish occurrences so often convinces me that I can now confidently invite guests home, trusting Jesus to provide the food when I am in need, supplying abundantly what I lack.
Since writing the above I am amused to see how God is weaning me off of depending on others to provide food. He is enabling me to cook it myself, e.g. after our weekly family dinner where I cooked steak (one of the few dishes I am confident of cooking) there was so much leftover that the next day I invited our pastor and wife to eat before they gave us a lift to our cell meeting.
I would never have attempted to invite guests home at such short notice.
I see how God is teaching me in small steps how to do things which I never imagined doing before. More and more I am learning new dishes and improving on old ones and just at the right time because my daughter and her husband from China are in Perth for their summer break and I have been able to dish up a meal everyday with no stress.
Precept upon precept, line by line, bit by bit, God is teaching me to ‘’just do it’’. True enough there is no anxiety. How amazingly understanding is our God. 
